Housekeeping

A beautifully written gem of a novel about loneliness and transience. If you have a chance, see the movie, starring Christine Lahti. She's wonderful in it.

Update: Sept 2011
This slim little volume is Robinson’s debut novel. It is beautifully written, with lyrical prose. But very little actually happens in the book to move the story. And that is the whole point, I think.

At its core it is a novel about loss, abandonment, loneliness and transience.

Ruthie and Lucille are orphaned at an early age when their mother commits suicide by driving into the lake near their grandparents’ home – the same lake into which their grandfather’s train plunged long before they were born. They are raised by their grandmother and, when she dies, two show more great aunts (their grandfather’s maiden sisters) who simply cannot cope. Eventually their aunt Sylvie (their mother’s youngest sister) arrives to care for them.

But it slowly becomes clear to Ruth and Lucille, and eventually the whole town, that Sylvie is an odd duck. She never wants the lights on, she prefers cold food, she collects empty cans and old newspapers, she seems oblivious to social convention and even to the cold. She is clearly struggling with having to stay put and care for her nieces, when her heart is in wandering, being transient and beholden to no one.

Still Ruth and Lucille love her … until Lucille’s emerging need to become a part of a larger society of friends drives a wedge between her and her sister and aunt. And things rapidly deteriorate once Lucille abandons Ruthie and Sylvie to the house that floods in the spring, to wandering the woods at night, and exploring the lake in a stolen boat.

The ending is inevitable, sad, and uplifting all at once. The movie version has a much happier, “freer” feel to the ending than the book does, and perhaps the memory of that last movie scene colors my impression.

I love the language of this book, the images are so different - clear but murky – in a sort of half-dream state. show less

I really thought this book was delightful for what it was: a tale of sisters growing up rather isolated in a small town, with few friends, and shuffled between elderly family members who die, only to be left with their aunt who... isn't quite right.

The writing is quite wonderful and evocative and clear but like many traditional lit pieces like this, it's often slow and thoughtful and nothing much happens except a quiet life of quiet, slow desperation.

I admit to feeling like I ought to have felt the bucolic country life seeping into my soul, but what I really felt was Sylvie's transience, her ghostliness, her inability to truly commit to taking care of her two nieces. She always had a foot out the door.

I really felt anxious as hell. It show more was sad even as it drew me in. show less

Not at all what I expected. I was thinking this was about some poor woman taking care of a house. Hmm. Ok, it is. But, well, we're in Idaho, in a little podunk isolated town. And there aren't really any men around, or life structure, or, well, housekeeping. This a book of a free childhood surrounded by the American wilderness. There are elements of [A River Runs Through it]. And there are elements of a Huck Finn fantasy childhood. It's hard and confusing for these two girls, and beautiful. The prose is beautiful. Continually. Let loose by the girl's own freedom, the prose creates texture, breathes, sets pace, moves the reader. It's really special. There are darker underlying themes, and some questions the reader might want to press our show more poor author on, particularly about the ending. But mostly this book brings something to life. The girls and their oddball aunt live in here.

One of my best books of the year. It doesn't work for everyone, but when it does, it really has a lot to offer. So, I'm recommending it to you, dear patient review reader.

2025
https://www.librarything.com/topic/375106#9046861 show less

Housekeeping is a novel about intergenerational relationships, the outsider in society but most poignantly it is a novel about loneliness and loss. Robinson creates a moving and dense portrait of a familial and physical landscape. My favorite parts of the book are when the narrator descends to a register akin to biblical language to describe the lake that has claimed so many victims and the mountains surrounding the town of Fingerbone. The narrative loses energy and strength during Ruth's navel-gazing about her own social ineptitude but these bits are few and far between. This is an excellent novel and reminded me a whole lot, in terms of tone and landscape, of Denis Johnson's "Train Dreams."

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Rereading Housekeeping I was much more show more fascinated with the emotional arc of the characters. My previous review mentions navel-gazing, which I found much more engaging the second time around, particularly because Ruth mentions in passing that she is experiencing puberty. Bafflingly, Robinson doesn't engage this experience or her sexuality in any meaningful way in the text. Yet maybe like the experiences surrounding the lake it was pushed down deep into dark waters where it couldn't be found particularly if the energy was directed at familial figures however I didn't get much from the novel to suggest this could be the case. show less

Housekeeping is a strange, difficult and beautiful novel. I am generally for the idea that form is content, and I think this axiom applies to Housekeeping. Ruth, our narrator, is a young girl whose intimate proximity to loss shapes her entire world, be it the mysterious, self-effacing nature of the town of Fingerbone or the family members who disappear near the very same lake that is explicitly likened to the biblical flood.

Most of the novel is told in the imperative mode ("imagine this" / "say that") and as such, only exist insofar that the reader agrees, along with Ruth, to the act of creation, or resurrection, as the novel would prefer. Ruth, a child whose life has been defined by death, can only comprehend her present through what show more is not - her act of resurrecting the dead through these imperatives, bespeak of a love that reveals only through monumental loss. Unlike her sister, Lucille, who'd rather stick with the conventional rituals of daily life to fend off despair, Ruth is inclined towards embracing death and her sorrow (she often dreams of being swallowed whole by the lake); understanding, maybe, that destruction is simply another act of creation. In the event of her mother's apparent suicide, Ruth imagines her sorrow, realising that that it is only in death that this sorrow can be felt, given a materiality that otherwise wouldn't exist. For Robinson, love is infinite; like God, it considers that whatever is lost, can be felt again in other ways. show less

Most first novels are somewhat autobiographical, and this is no exception. This tale of two orphan sisters who grow apart is set in the fictional Fingerbone, Idaho, which, Wikipedia informs me, is clearly modeled on Marilynne Robinson’s hometown, nestled on the shores of a glacial lake. Yet, while the locale, which gives the book its sense of place, is rooted in fact, the story is richly imaginative.

The two sisters are each other’s only stable relationship, as a changing cast of adults nominally care for them. The girls take this as a given until the younger of the two, Lucille, begins to sense its unconventionality and, without warning, moves in with a high school teacher.

The book is narrated by the older sister, Ruthie, who show more observes and records all, judging nothing. Instead, she is sustained by the trust that these seemingly random givens will all come together. “What are all the fragments for,” she asks, “if not to be knit up finally?” Later, she observes: “For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like a thing as a thing and its shadow. . . . And here again is a foreshadowing — the world will be made whole.”

The thing and its shadow: This polarity lies behind the book’s title, Housekeeping, paired with transience. As she follows her aunt Sylvie to abandon the family home to live on the road, she says: “Now truly we were cast out to wander, and there was an end to housekeeping.”

The expression Ruthie uses for this, “cast out to wander,” evokes the many Biblical allusions that course through the book: Cain and Abel (the first pair of siblings), Noah’s wife, Lot’s wife.

The book is written in rich, detailed prose, precise, not fussy, with an overall mood of melancholy and stoicism. It is an achingly beautiful book. show less

Marilynne Robinson's "Housekeeping" already has two-hundred reviews of LibraryThing, so I'm not sure that there's anything of substance that I can really add to the discussion. I'll just say that text is freighted with heavy themes ranging from the artistic to the Biblical to the social but that reading it feels as easy and natural as breathing. Reading this one is like watching someone hit an impossibly long series of mind-bendingly complex half-court shots without breaking a sweat, seemingly barely aware that there's a basketball hoop somewhere out there in the distance. I often found myself so impressed by the prose that I had to leaf back to see what, exactly, I'd missed in terms of content. There was always something, so I'll show more probably have to reread this one soon.

I'm docking this half a star because despite the fact that I'm awed by Ms. Robinson's abilities as a writer, there's a tinge of a certain fantastical old-timiness here that bothers me. The book begins with the shocking and somewhat mysterious wreck of a passenger train. That's fine, but it signals a sort of nostalgic tone that continues throughout the text. Whatever Robinson is, she doesn't care to be much of a realist, and "Housekeeping" sometimes seems like a concerted effort to describe a beautiful but now almost entirely vanished version of American life. It's not for nothing that it's difficult to say exactly which decade of the twentieth century this novel is set in: I couldn't find a reference to single historical event that happened in the larger world that might offer a definitive clue. The Fingerbone, Washington that our narrator describes is a place so isolated that it seems not just geographically remote but also a bit adrift in time, too, the sort of place where the past lingers for as long as circumstances let it. For reasons specific to my own life experience, this isn't the sort of artistic preoccupation that draws me in, and I feel that, in the hands of an even marginally less gifted writer, the whole novel could have slid into solidly unspectacular whimsy. The author's talent is so prodigious that it never does, but there's still a bit of it hanging about, which keeps me from giving it the five stars its prose earns from its first page onwards. Recommended to everyone, but most of all to aspiring writers. It's hard not to think that Marilynne Robinson, who I'd somehow never read until now, set a new bar for good prose here, and one that everyone that follows will find hard to clear. In short, this one's so good that it's almost intimidating. show less