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Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson
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An unabridged audio edition of this classic work on the 25th anniversary of its first publication
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.
- Sales Rank: #2026695 in Books
- Published on: 1982-03
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
The wonders of transients, transience, truancy and trains
By BOB
The disaster has become a folkloric tale in the Pacific Northwest town of Fingerbone, as momentous in its history as the sinking of the Titanic was to the larger world stage. It is much more personal to Ruthie and Lucille, two orphans, their grandmother, whose husband was on the train that plunged off the railroad bridge into the icy depths of the lake, their mother Helen and their aunt Sylvie.
The family tale of the grandfather, who had grown up in the East and from childhood became obsessed with mountains and kept moving west until he found them, has cast a shadow over his descendants. Ruthie and Lucille’s mother Helen drove them back to Fingerbone from Seattle, deposited them with their grandmother, then drove off a cliff to her own cold, permanent sleep. Grandmother died, two great aunts came to live with the girls, then retired from the obligation once they had successfully lured the girls’ Aunt Sylvie back to the family home to look after the girls.
Marilynne Robinson appeared on the literary stage in 1980 with her novel ‘Housekeeping’, in my view the most impressive debut since Walker Percy’s ‘The Moviegoer’, then disappeared into academia and essay collections for over 20 years until a trilogy of novels, ‘Gilead’, ‘Home’ and Lila’ brought her back into the public consciousness.
The novel is a first person narrative from Ruthie, the older sister, from the vantage point of a few years after the concluding events of this novel. Her introversion and solitary nature seem to have cultivated a vision akin to Emerson, Thoreau and Melville, all of whom are recalled by such a breadth of poetic vision and transcendental wonder.
The grandfather got a job with the railroad and rose up to a supervisory capacity, eventually becoming the stationmaster. On a moonless night, the Fireball was halfway across the bridge “when the engine nosed over toward the lake and then the rest of the train slid after it into the water like a weasel sliding off a rock.”
The time is unspecified but could be anywhere from the 1940’s to the 1950’s. Ruthie and Lucille are solitary orphans, whose primary social contact is each other. Knowing that they were abandoned by an absent father and a suicidal mother, they are sensitized to any upheaval or departure that resembles yet another in a series of abandonments. Sylvie is still married, presumably separated from her husband for some time and has been a transient for the last few years. The girls absorb that information fairly quickly and therefore are alarmed whenever they wake up and she’s gone. Sometimes she merely sleeps outside. Ruthie is ever hopeful: “I was reassured by her sleeping on the lawn, and now and then in the car. It seemed to me that if she could remain transient here, she would not have to leave.”
What becomes the new normal to Ruthie is extremely disturbing to Lucille. When Lucille is absent for a week from school, Sylvie writes an absurd excuse giving the game away immediately. Lucille throws the letter away and the girls simply don’t return to school for the rest of the year. They spy Sylvie wandering by the lake, sometimes climbing up on the fatal bridge and would not be surprised if Sylvie decided to follow the example of her sister and father. They see her sleeping on a bench in the train station with a newspaper over her face. When she discovers that the girls have not been attending school, she refrains from giving them the expected scolding, an occurrence that leaves both girls feeling especially adrift. They spend days out in the woods. As Ruthie says, “I went to the woods for the woods’ own sake, while, increasingly, Lucille seemed to be enduring a banishment there.” A wedge begins to separate the girls as Lucille seeks the company of other girls and eventually goes her own way until finally moving in with a childless teacher. This strengthens the bond between Sylvie and Ruthie and Ruthie becomes reconciled to Sylvie’s lifestyle and begins to adopt it for herself.
Throughout the novel, the water and the train both exert an irresistible magnetic pull. The girls see the divergent paths of following each illustrated in the fates of their mother and their aunt. Lucille exempts herself from making either choice by leaving the home altogether.
Meanwhile, Ruthie learns to appreciate simple beauty from her association with Sylvie. When home they often follow Sylvie’s habit of sitting in the dark, “enjoying the evening”:
‘She seemed to dislike the disequilibrium of counterpoising a roomful of light against a worldful of darkness. Sylvie in a house was more or less like a mermaid in a ship’s cabin.”
Ruthie succumbs to Sylvie’s persuasion to get out in a boat on the lake and see the sun come up. Later she agrees to a search for a ruined cabin in the woods where a family once dwelled that is so secluded that the sun doesn’t reach enough of it to thaw it out for spring.
The novel is sprinkled on almost every page with passages of beauty, freshness and wisdom. Becoming reconciled to solitude, Ruthie muses:
‘Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them. You simply say, “Here are the perimeters of our attention. If you prowl around under the windows till the crickets go silent, we will pull the shades. If you wish us to suffer your envious curiosity, you must permit us not to notice it.” Anyone with one solid human bond is that smug, and it is the smugness as much as the comfort and safety that lonely people covet and admire.”
Robinson/Ruthie even conjures a unique fresh approach to the Biblical/Christian myth:
‘Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it. God Himself was pulled after us into the vortex we made when we fell, or so the story goes. And while He was on earth He mended families. He gave Lazarus back to his mother, and to the centurion he gave his daughter again…Being man He felt the pull of death, and being God He must have wondered more than we do what it would be like.”
In view of an inevitable separation and further splintering of family, Sylvie and Ruthie abandon their housekeeping and, like the misfit Huck Finn, ‘light out for the territory’. Although Robinson has no overt agenda, this is a feminist novel. The men in the family have departed, leaving only women and the women that can’t or won’t conform to the expectations of their society live on its fringes like Sylvie and Ruthie. Has Sylvie gone mad or simply achieved spiritual enlightenment? It hardly matters in view of the fact that she sees the novelty and beauty of the world, even in mundane pleasures such as removing the wrapping from discarded cans, rinsing them and setting them up in a pyramid on the kitchen table, stacks of newspapers “for insulation”, or carrying crackers in her pockets in case she runs into one of those children from the abandoned cabin. Abandoned by community and family, these women have created their own.
It is difficult for me to conceive that Robinson will ever surpass ‘Housekeeping’ for lyrical beauty, originality and breadth of perceptual vision. Each sentence is crafted with a precision and care that Flaubert would have admired. Few novels have so seamlessly woven the buoyancy of joy and the darkness of despair into such a profound meditation on the delicate and transitory nature of Beauty.
121 of 139 people found the following review helpful.
Beautiful, but tedious
By M. Gibson
I read Gilead a while ago and loved it. Its language was beautiful and haunting, the story tender and heart-breaking. Housekeeping was different. It also has beautiful language, but that is where the similarities end. I have been wracking my brain trying to figure out what I did not like about this novel and the answer finally came to me: it has no plot. It has no substance. It had immense potential to be great, but for me, it fell utterly flat. Let me be clear, the language is BEAUTIFUL. There are passages on practically every page that made me breathless with the beautiful and creative wordplay of Ms. Robinson, but it was not enough to push the narrative forward on its own. I understand the symbolism, the allusions, etc. of the novel, but I also want the plot to move the story along, not the descriptions of a place alone. I want characters that I come to care about to push the story onward, I want a climax, I want to care about what happens to them on the next page, and sadly, I did not.
One could say that the lack of any feeling the reader had for the characters was the author's way of getting the reader to feel the lack of love and caring that the girls experienced in their own family. If so, I get it, but I wanted to made to feel that, even if their own family didn't care about them, I did. But that is not what happened. I simply stopped caring.
It just felt to me that the author used the idea of these two girls and their awkward, off-beat, tragic family as a vehicle for her magnificent use of the English language. And magnificent though it was, the story got bogged down with all of that lavish description, and I wanted more than that. I wanted substance.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
... that raved about how it was one of the best books ever written
By Annette
I bought this book because I had read a review online that raved about how it was one of the best books ever written, and I guess I've learned my lesson not to ever do that again. This book did not live up to my expectations at all. I read until page 33 and couldn't stand it anymore. Several issues I had with this book:
1. Author seems to think that one doesn't need to have a plot when writing a novel.
2. Author's writing style is incredibly difficult to read. A lot of her sentence structures make absolutely no sense. No sense whatsoever!
Don't waste your time, and if you do, at least get this book from the library rather than wasting your money on it.
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