Name: Housekeeping
Rating: 4.129310344827586 (58 reviews)
ISBN: 9781429954464

Marilynne Robinson

A Novel

Housekeeping

Linda LaSalle

Edwin Lang

Spoiler-alert Who of us cannot fail to recall with especial clarity some person we once loved but who is now gone. That is the essence of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, at least for me who lost his Dad at 9, right at the end of my Grade 3 school year. When one loses someone, in Robinson’s words ‘they seem to grow gigantic and multiple … (seem) to fill the whole house’. But if we don’t lose that person, ‘we don’t remember them that way. (Their) eccentricities might have irked and embarrassed us as we got older. We would have forgotten their birthday. … Then we would telephone out of guilt and nostalgia’. But if (they) die, ‘it breaks the family and releases sorrow … and I think sorrow is a predatory thing’. Overall though Housekeeping is a gentle and kind book. As summarized very well by <a> Madelaine Lucas for LitHub </a> “First published in 1980, Housekeeping is the story of two sisters, Ruth and Lucille, who are raised by a rotating cast of eccentric female family members after their mother drives a borrowed Ford off a cliff and into the lake that dominates the fictional town of Fingerbone. Abandoned on the porch of their grandmother’s home, the girls left in her care until she is replaced in the house by two great-aunts, and then eventually, by their mother’s itinerant sister Sylvie.” I will just add that it is an understatement to say that Sylvie is ‘fey’, that is unworldly. But like the book she is kind. Although not discussed explicitly, Ruthie’s mother (Helen), Molly and Sylvie, the aunt that ultimately takes the place of her dead mother, all respond to the loss of their father many years before in a train disaster that happened at Fingerbone in the very town in which they live. Molly leaves home, becoming a missionary in a far-away land, never to be seen again. Helen commits suicide. And Sylvie remains rootless, becoming a transient, or as Madelaine Lucas notes in her excellent review: “Sylvie is one of my favorite heroines, and the first female vagabond I encountered in contemporary American literature.” The town, in a good Christian sense, rallies around little Ruth to ‘rescue’ her from becoming a transient like her aunt Sylvie. And there is considerable foreboding because in some sense readers, or I at least, don’t want her to be saved. There is no evil in Sylvie, or even unkindness or even a sense of impending ruin. What saves the book, for me, is that Ruth does escape with Sylvie. And it wasn’t just that she runs away with her aunt but that she trusts her enough to do so. It is not that Sylvie asks ‘Do you trust me Ruthie?’. Ruth just did, not immediately but instinctively. Her sister, Lucille, though had left home, exasperated by Sylvie’s eccentricities, and Ruth years later imagines her living ‘in a fury of righteousness and cleanliness’, ‘fiercely neat, stalemating the forces of ruin’. She imagines also Lucille’s sense of loss. In spite of the religious overtures, there is no sense of guilt or sin, or harshness that sometimes religion can inadvertently encourage. People, perhaps opinionated, are simply being human, and generally at their reasonable best. When the Fingerbone Sherriff drops by to assess Sylvie’s parenting of Ruth, and again to ensure the child’s safety, he is gentle and almost embarrassed to intrude. Robinson says of the role of religion in her<a> Paris Review Interview:</a> “Religion is a framing mechanism. It is a language of orientation that presents itself as a series of questions. It talks about the arc of life and the quality of experience in ways that I’ve found fruitful to think about. Religion has been profoundly effective in enlarging human imagination and expression. It’s only very recently that you couldn’t see how the high arts are intimately connected to religion”. And as Mark O’Connell wrote in the New Yorker article <a> ,The First Church of Marilynne Robinson: </a> “Her spiritual sensibility is richly inclusive and non-dogmatic. There’s little talk about sin or damnation in her writing, but a lot about forgiveness and tolerance and kindness.” As our good Pope Francis writes in Fratelli Tutti, “Faith, and the humanism it inspires” may be one reason why we readers cheer when Sylvie and Ruthie escape, and dangerously so in crossing the railway bridge in the dark and against a strong wind. Edwin

A modern classic, Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, their eccentric and remote aunt. The family house is in the small Far West town of Fingerbone set on a glacial lake, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck, and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town "chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere." Ruth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transience.

honestly almost exactly the same as the movie lol. i think i am interested in Sylvie as a character but i dont love the writing style here. good though

yasi

Really beautiful read, thoroughly enjoyed it! 

John Vetter

Cody Degen

Not so much a story as it is a like, a series of 360 windmill dunks on the English language

Lamia Hajani

Honestly, the beginning was hard to get through. The sentences are needlessly long-winded, and the story started off confusing. About half-way through, I realized that I was starting to like the book and, by the time I was 75% through, I loved the book. I would recommend you do your best to get through the book - it's worth it. The story is different, the characters are nuanced, and the ending is poetic. Not a 5/5, because I don't think it should take that much effort to get through a book, but certainly a 4/5.

Jeremy Wang

wow i really missed marilynne robinson. and i’m so glad i came back to housekeeping: in most ways, i prefer it over gilead. where reading gilead felt like wandering iowa fields and occasionally stumbling across an interesting tree or person, reading housekeeping felt like being quietly consumed by the rising waters of fingerbone lake. something was always quietly happening, and before you knew it, the solitary waters had already swallowed you. 

and the prose! i was dog-earing the memorable passages but then realized i had to stop before i literally doubled the book’s volume with folds. when marilynne robinson said “it’s all beauty, everywhere you look, from the clouds down” at augustine 2020, i didn’t quite see that reflected in her writing. but in housekeeping, ruthie and sylvie, the lonely observers, really do unearth the beauty hiding in park benches and sunken houses. 

musing on robinson’s notion of lonesomeness: what makes it so different from loneliness?

alex 

so many favorite quotes. 

- “Water is almost nothing, after all. It is conspicuously different from air only in its tendency to flood and founder and drown, and even that difference may be relative rather than absolute” (pg. 164)

- “So the transients wandered through Fingerbone like ghosts, terrifying as ghosts are because they were not very different from us” (pg. 178)

What a perfectly strange and careful book! I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to love it when it had a Doris Lessing blurb in plain view, but truly delightful. If you’re in a dreary, melancholy, drifting off kind of mood, or would like to enter one, give it a go. 

Jeremy Boyd

Emmett

Strange, dark, swirling and beautiful ruminations on adolescence, solitude, family legacies, a child's widening consciousness of the world and the struggle to understand loss and abandonment. The backdrop of the small, rural, uncompromisingly conservative town of Fingerbone set against a bare wintry landscape is the story's counterpart in stark, raw beauty: Ruthie's voice is wine-dark and lake-deep, ponderous with poetic lines and protean metaphors that slide and shift from one sentiment to the next, mimicking the rocking of a boat out in the water, savouring emotion with sincere wonder and piercing insight. Although her unambitious account begins very early, predating her childhood, and ends with her as a young woman of the world, it is difficult to imagine her as a child, or even one that lives among indifferent domestic mess with her aunt Sylvie as housekeeper, or someone aimless, taking up odd jobs to pass the time, devoid of human drive. Rather she gives the impression of a poet, wise beyond her years and quietly observant of everyone around her, drenching her bildungsroman in water and light, returning repeatedly to key formative events that jostle with others, just as waves continually bring drifting articles back to the shore. Perhaps the story tackles the question: 'what does it mean to drift?' Drifting positively connotes freedom, variety (Sylvie's stories about other people), detaching oneself from the consequences of the past and its emotional valences, but drifting also risks meaninglessness - Sylvie's life and stories are seemingly devoid of any greater significance or value beyond what they are, and they stand in contrast to Lucille's energetic, angrily desperate attempts to break out of their lives, to do things, to make (a dress), to distinguish herself and have a life of her own, even if it means being like the other young people in the town.

Donald

Newly reissued as a Picador Modern Classic, Marilynne Robinson's brilliant, PEN/Hemingway Award-winning first novel Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, the eccentric and remote sister of their dead mother. The family house is in the small town of Fingerbone on a glacial lake in the Far West, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town "chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere." Ruth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transience. For more than twenty years, Picador has been producing beautifully packaged literary fiction and nonfiction books from Manhattan's Flatiron Building. Our Twentieth Anniversary Modern Classics line pairs iconic books with a design that's both small enough to fit in your pocket and unique enough to stand out on your bookshelf.

Christopher McCaffery

This is my favorite of Robinson's that I've read.

Trevor Berrett

For my complete review, go here:

http://mookse.wordpress.com/2008/11/0...

Laura Springall

This is kind of a hard book to rate for me. I was good in its own way, but at the same time I never would have even considered picking it up if I didn't have to read it for class. The writing style is beautiful and poetic, and I liked how complex the themes were, and I liked the characters and the story. But while I did like pretty much everything about this book, at the same time I didn't. It's really hard to explain. I wouldn't necessarily recommend Housekeeping, but I also wouldn't tell someone not to read it. I'm kind of all over the place with how I feel about Housekeeping lol

Daryl Houston

A friend suggested this one, and I did like it. She said that every sentence does something, which is surely true, but to me, it was almost too much. I don't want to advocate for throwaway sentences, but when every sentence is so very vigorous in rhythm, vocabulary, metaphor, and so on, it becomes almost overstimulating. The book didn't connect a lot for me emotionally (though I suppose it did more as it drew nearer the end), and I wonder if that's partially because I'm a man -- if a book in which men are absent, ghost, or parody and women are grappling with alienation and with their traditional roles as mothers, grandmothers, and housekeepers is one that I'm very well equipped to form a strong connection with in the first place.

Sameer Vasta

There will come a time in a conversation with a stranger or a new friend when they will ask me why my work has taken me to so many different countries, why I never stayed in place for too long. The answer I always give, somewhat cheekily, somewhat accurately, is that “I get antsy after more than three years in one city.”

It has been five years since I last moved back to Toronto. Before that, for more than a decade, I jumped from city to city every two or three years, always looking for the next new thing, looking for a new adventure or challenge or just a change of pace and scenery.

About a year after moving back to Toronto, a former friend once laughed and called me a transient, a drifter. He chuckled as he said, in jest and in good nature, that if I had been born a few decades earlier, I would have been among those that rode the freight trains, jumping off in a new town and setting up life there, only to pack up and leave a short while later.

***

There has been much written about transience in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping; a quick search online reveals academic papers on the subject that are longer than the novel itself. It’s true that the story is primarily about moving, and moving on—what struck me most is how the book is also about the difficulty of staying home.

Our protagonist is caught between these two worlds, and perhaps perpetually caught between many worlds: Ruthie never really finds her place until the end of the novel, and even then, that place is fleeting. Ruthie exists in liminality, between childhood and adulthood, between frivolity and seriousness, between feeling and thinking, between bad mistakes and good judgment, between carelessness and responsibility, between the desire to run and the desire to stay.

Mrs. Robinson’s prose captures the limbo beautifully. She uses words like brushstrokes on a canvas. The story is more painting than text: it changes and morphs and reveals new insight upon every read depending on how close you are to it that day. At times, you feel enveloped by the bleakness of Fingerbone; at others, you sit away from it, watching the town in wonder as its inhabitants go about their lives with a sorrowful merriment.

As readers, we are never in one place. Mrs. Robinson makes us feel the transience of the characters of the novel through her prose, by making the reader drift through space and time and perspective. We are constantly moving, and even when we are staying still, we await the next time we will be displaced. The descriptions are vivid, memorable; the amount of time we are able to linger upon those descriptions are short and fleeting. With every turn of the page, we are led to wonder what adventures lie beyond the bridge across the lake, yet still want to stay in Fingerbone for a little while longer.

Housekeeping is masterful at telling this story of transience, not because it is about always leaving to go somewhere new, but because it places us in the grey zone between the old and the new, the then and the now, the here and the there. It is a tale of liminality more than transience, of the embrace of uncertainty.

***

There’s a line, about halfway through Housekeeping, that reads: “It seemed to me that if she could remain transient here, she would not have to leave.”

It is a short passage that is easy to quickly read past, but it is one I came back to, again and again. It reminded me of a revelation that came to me when I lived in the US capital.

It was in Washington DC when I first realized that it was easy for me to live a life where all my possessions could fit into two or three boxes. It was in Washington DC when I first realized that I had remained, for many years before that, transient in the cities where I lived.

DC is the most transient city I have ever known: nobody there stays, but instead “passes through.” Sometimes, they pass through for a few months, or a couple of years, and sometimes, they pass through for a few decades, but there were very few people that I might that were born in the District and planned to die there too.

Sylvie, in Housekeeping, is also passing through. We did not know for just how long she would stay, but we knew that one day, she would hop on the train and ride the tracks across the bridge to a new adventure. In the meantime, she would act erratically and oddly—transiently—while she remained in Fingerbone with her nieces.

For years before my recent return to Toronto, I was only passing through every city in which I lived. I knew that I would soon be gone, but didn’t know quite when that time would come. Instead, I would live minimally, with few possessions, and would spend my time as an explorer in my own town. To some, perhaps I was erratic and odd; to myself, I was simply transient, prepared at any moment to leave, but willing myself to stay.

I am no longer transient here. While I know that, realistically, I will undoubtedly be somewhere new soon, I no longer spend my time in expectation of that move. The liminality has been replaced by a sense of settlement: I feel settled in place, in mind, in love, in life, and no longer caught between one space and another.

(Full review on ITellStories.org)

Gary Homewood

Family break up, relationships and loneliness through the eyes of a child. Some compelling dreamlike passages and imagery (looking in on lighted windows, trains), effective if occasionally over-wrought language.

Housekeeping A Novel

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