Housekeeping

Marilynne Robinson won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for her novel Gilead. Housekeeping, written in 1980, is her first and only other work of fiction. It’s the story of Ruthie and her sister Lucille, who grow up under the care of their grandmother, and when she died, of their great aunts Lily and Nona, and when they fled, of their aunt Sylvie. They live in the tiny Idaho town of Fingerbone on a glacial lake where their grandfather died when his train went off the bridge and where their mother died when she drove off a cliff. It is a story about loss and longing, about how family bonds outlast absence and even death.

Housekeeping is a dark and dreamy novel, abstract, ponderous, murky. It's a slow-paced book of very little plot and very beautiful language which is often challenging—steeped in metaphor and foggy with abstraction. It is a book about becoming, about the devastating losses that lead to Ruthie becoming a transient, a ghost. “When did I become so unlike other people?” she asks herself at the end. “Either it was when I followed Sylvie across the bridge, and the lake claimed us, or it was when my mother left me waiting for her, and established in me the habit of waiting and expectation which makes any present moment most significant for what it does not contain.” It's that sense of absence, of what her life does not contain, that so haunts Ruthie.

What is good about this book:

Details, when they are provided, are wonderful—concrete and specific, very closely observed. Check this out:

I have often wondered what it seemed like to Sylvie to come back to that house, which would have changed since she left it, shifted and settled. I imagine her with her grips in her bare hands, walking down the middle of the road, which was narrowed by the banks of plowed snow on either side, and narrowed more by the slushy pools that were forming at the foot of each bank. Sylvie always walked with her head down, to one side, with an abstracted and considering expression, as if someone were speaking to her in a soft voice. But she would have glanced up sometimes at the snow, which was the color of heavy clouds, and the sky, which was the color of melting snow, and all the slick black planks and sticks and stumps that erupted as the snow sank away.

I like how carefully she describes the road, the colors of the sky and snow, the tilt of Sylvie’s head, the expression on her face. Too, Ruthie is really only imagining this scene, and this is something else I enjoyed about the book—the narrator imagining how things must have been for others, what a given situation might have been like for them, what might have happened if…. There is something really generous about the way she thinks, and the book ends very satisfyingly with one such imagining.

Location plays an amazing role in this book. It casts a pall of gloom that is never really interrupted. The setting is stark and cheerless, a sort of gray watery vastness that is not exactly pleasant, but I have to admire Robinson’s skillful use of place to create a mood and set a tone. Water images pervade the book, the lake is a constant, haunting presence, and the landscape—the ring of mountains that surrounds the lake—eclipses the small town, engulfing it in a “spacious silence that seemed to ring like glass.” It's eerie and beautiful.

Also I was impressed by the use of imagery. In fact a person of greater ambition than I could write a very decent paper tracing Ruthie’s journey from fairly normal child to ghostly transient through the image of a lit house at night, of looking at a lit house from the outside. The first use of this image is very early in the book, when the two sisters are coming home late from ice skating on the lake:

“We walked the blocks from the lake to our grandmother’s house, jealous to the point of rage of those who were already accustomed to the light and the
somnolent warmth of the houses we passed…When we finally came to our house, which was low and set back and apart by its orchard, we were not much surprised to see it still standing, the porch and kitchen lights shining as warmly as any we had passed.”

At this point, when they are so young, the lit house simply represents physical comfort and shelter, the security of knowing their aunts are waiting inside, though too in that scene there is an ominous mention of the darkness hovering just outside the lights. Moving through the book the lit house image appears repeatedly, becoming a more overt symbol of the sort of shelter provided by familial bonds, human relations. Finally at the end, there is a strange, shocking scene where the entire house—every last window—is lit up, and Ruthie, outside in the dark orchard, can’t imagine going inside. Entering would somehow mean the further loss or forgetting of “her kind”—which I took to mean her mother, her grandfather, grandmother, all the people she’s lost—and so the physical comfort would not, in fact, comfort.

Finally, it is a story about sisters, about the close bond of sisterhood and the devastating effects of that bond being broken. I like reading about sisters.

What I did not so much enjoy:

I had difficulty wading through this book. As I said before, it’s slow and murky, and that made it not a book that I couldn’t wait to pick up again—I had to force myself to read it sometimes. Too, the language is occasionally bogged down by strange word choices and muddled abstractions. Here’s an example:

I remember Sylvie walking through the house with a scarf tied around her hair, carrying a broom. Yet this was the time that leaves began to gather in the corners. They were leaves that had been through the winter, some of them worn to a net of veins. There were scraps of paper among them, crisp and strained from their mingling in the cold brown liquors of decay and regeneration, and on these scraps there were sometimes words. One read Powers Meet, and another, which had been the flap of an envelope, had a penciled message in anonymous hand: I think of you. Perhaps Sylvie when she swept took care not to molest them. Perhaps she sensed a Delphic niceness in the scattering of these leaves and paper, here and not elsewhere, thus and not otherwise.

You see how the paragraph starts out with lovely, concrete details and then devolves into something very like nonsense? Delphic niceness? Does anyone know what that means? and what the heck are those last two phrases?

Anyway, my final verdict: Housekeeping is a novel I respect, and a reading experience I value, even if I did not entirely enjoy it. If you do read it, give yourself time to read very slowly. Savor the beauty of its language and the chill of its disturbing, quiet drama.