Housekeeping: A Novel (Picador Modern Classics)

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.

I ordered this book after listening to a program about it on NPR's Diane Rehm Show. I fully agree with the radio commentators on the quality of Robinson's writing and the richness of her imagery. As urged by Doris Lessing (in a review quoted on the jacket), I read this slowly and then more slowly, and will probably return to it again, but unlike several other readers I did not find it heavy going, for its essence does not lie in its plot but in the enfolding and refolding of its thoughts.A difficult book to understand? Yes surely. But very unusually in my experience, the jacket blurb includes a phrase which provides the perfect key to reading this book: "the dangerous and deep undertow of transience." It is, in fact, a meditation on impermanence, and it operates on a plane of recurrent and beautifully crafted imagery whose overall effect is almost surreal and certainly spiritual. The facts of this particular story are unimportant compared to the sense that everything we have and are in this world, and all the "housekeeping" we frantically undertake to keep hold of it, are temporary at best. I have certainly felt this myself, and I am not depressed but consoled to know that others understand this too.Robinson's beautiful writing does have another side to it, however. Unlike other books about childhood, this one is narrated in a voice of exquisite sophistication. But the authorial voice does not square with what we know of the education and later life of the heroine, giving a self-conscious air to its artifice, despite the manifest poetic talent of the writer. Read as a sustained prose poem, however, the book is nothing less than superb, a minor masterpiece.[Thinking again about this book a year after reading it, I also recognize that, although the details of its plot may vanish, it is one of those rare novels whose atmosphere and message grow and deepen in the memory, long after one has laid it down.]

Feel free to ignore the number of stars that I've given this book. Depending on how I look at it, it either deserves 5 or none. I never really could find a middle ground. (Spoiler alert) Writing from the perspective of someone living dissociated from society following a tragedy is brilliant; however, Ruthie's absorption in the minute detail of all that surrounds her is extremely tedious, albeit believable. Robinson expertly uses each word to make you feel that emotional pain. The sadness from the book has followed me for days.If you want to experience Marilynne Robinson's genius in an uplifting way, read Gilead. It is the best written book that I have ever read. Reading Gilead was almost a holy experience for me. The book addresses thoughts about the end of life that I could never have put into words in such an evocative way. Even better, the main character that she has created, Rev. Ames, embodies the Christ within us that we all aspire to. I never wanted the book to end, and wasn't that her point? We never want to lose anyone we love, do we?

Housekeeping is the type of book I love: one that keeps you meditating over the overarching themes and motifs in order to parse out some hidden meaning, to catch a glimpse of hierophany, long after you've laid the book down. It's a book that should be read slowly to soak up the lushness of Robinson's prose.I've read reviews about the book, both here and on other sites, and it seems that you either love it or hate it. I think that one of the reasons some people dislike the book is because Robinson does not precisely reveal the message to be taken away from it, forcing the reader to extrapolate meaning, which allows for varying interpretations that I believe may have to do with how engaged one is with the novel. I've had some people describe it to me as being a book about mental illness, and there were moments that I too wondered whether Sylvie was mentally ill, but after thinking over it, I've decided that this is too simple a reading. The book is full of movement, of depictions of the transitory state of the world, but in this state of constant change, there are resonances left behind and new revelations to be revealed. I have read that Robinson was greatly influenced by the transcendentalist who believed that heavenly revelation is not merely confined to the past but still takes place in the present. This may be why the novel has this searching characteristic to it, why Sylvie cannot find contentment in a sedentary existence, and why Ruth in the end too seems to long to wander this world. Housekeeping appears to be a metaphor for forcing and maintaining structure that is unnatural to our state of impermanency.This is a book about transience, family, and memory all bleeding together, about static society attempting to constrain a nonstatic world, and about the pressures of conformity and normalcy when the world is still in flux. One of the things I like best about the book is that the subject matter can be heavy, but it is written with a light touch and in sentences that seem to move like a wave across the page.

I had to read this novel for a class at my University. To be honest, I found this book to be very confusing. The first third of this book makes very little sense. Although, I will admit that the book did begin to get my attention when it was the sisters (Ruthie and Lucile) bonding with each other and deal with their Aunt's eccentric behavior.Ruthie's relationship with her sister did ultimately leave an impact on me. It made me think about my own relationship with my sister. The theme of impermanence is very chilling to think about. Unfortunately, the narrator, Ruthie, has a habit of rambling on until a point where I have no idea what she's talking about. At times, it borders on the line of incoherence. The confusing monologues of thoughts are well written on a technical level and it's clear the narrator paid great attention to language, vocabulary, and stressed syllables in words when writing it, but these monologues of poetic thoughts drag on and on to the point where it's difficult to tell what Ruthie is talking about.This is a well written novel on a technical level and I wouldn't call it bad. It's just difficult to understand. I can't make sense of a lot of these beautiful passages. I enjoy the first person narrative, Heart of Darkness for instance is incredible, but it's hard to get emotionally invested into this tangled sea of thoughts. It starts to feel like a run on sentence. I wish this book at focused on interactions between characters more and less on the vivid thoughts of Ruthie.

This beautifully formed novel is about the absence of boundaries: between perception, memory, thought and dreams; between oxygen and water; between the present and the past; between one's mother, grandmother and one's self; between Seattle and Fingerbone; and, ultimately between the here and the hereafter. Each of these flows into the other in this stunningly elegant work. This seamlessness most distinguishes this novel from Robinson's other two.Though this was the first of her novels, it's the one I've most recently read. In fact, I've read them in reverse order. "Home," was Dostoevsky-like in the brilliant way that the characters were revealed primarily by their dialogue (including what was unsaid). Gilead was the most "traditionally" structured as an epistolary novel. But Housekeeping may truly be the most exquisitely written. Each sentence in this novel is a gem to ponder, admire, feel, and stash away to reexamine again. It is most nearly poetry in the extraordinary quality of its images, language, and ideas.What the three have in common, though, is clear and what may ultimately define Robinson's body of work: the passing away and the passing forward of one generation to the next. For all the transience and ephemera that is "written" as the experience of Housekeeping, what is permanent, here and in her other works, is the contrast between that and the nearly tangible solidity and reliability of family. In Home, it was largely a two dimensional tale, a reframing of the Prodigal Son. In Gilead, it was only different from Housekeeping, in gender. Three generations of men, each paradoxically different in character, yet ultimately bearing the traits, expressions and even thoughts of their forbears. In Housekeeping likewise, Grandmother, to mother, to daughter, its the affinity of character and disposition and image, that is carried forward, and the differences in circumstances which fade.This struck me, most startlingly in Housekeeping, when Sylvie, the central character, a drifter and eccentric, seemingly abandons her niece, Ruthie, outside of a remote, abandoned home in a lake valley haunted, in Ruthie's mind, by the spirits of their mutually lost loved ones, and to Ruthie's own nightmares and reverie, and then, as she ultimately awakens her niece and walks her back in the cold and darkening dusk to their perilously tethered rowboat, stops on the way to peer into Ruthie's face, dispassionately and almost studiously, to look behind her eyes and into the soul of Ruthie's mother and her own departed sister.Sylvie, herself, is a wondrous character. She is both irrepressibly prone to wander and grateful to be grounded by the task of caring (not all that well) for her niece, the constant reminder of her own sister. She seems lost in thought and without a care for things material to her own well being, yet she obsesses over collecting and stacking worthless tin cans, and cherishes her trips to town to buy baubles for her nieces. When she disappears, as she constantly seems to be doing, we don't know any better than the two nieces in her charge whether she will be returning or pulled by the tide of her urge to wander away from Fingerbone.While some here have complained about the sobriety of this novel, and it is indeed quite somber in bits, it also contained some of the most humorous episodes I've read in Robinson's works. The way that young Ruthie's (and her sister's) grand-aunts and reluctant caretakers (before Sylvie's arrival) converse as if one person, and then go to ratify each other's statements, in between wishing they were "anywhere but here", had me chuckling out loud. Likewise, the conversations between the officiously charitable town women, out to rescue Ruthie from her aunt's eccentric ways, and our heroine Sylvie,added enough of the comedy of real life brought welcome balance and "terra firma" to the often dream-like experiences of the lives here described.The novel is set in the valley of a flood-ravaged and remote, lakeside town of Fingerbone (which almost humorously describes the damp chill that pervades the environment of this story). The water that's unrelentingly central to it's theme of flowing and receding waters of consciousness and experience so infuses the novel's pages that there are times when this reader felt himself becoming saturated with the weight of it. What made that particularly fitting, and more than a little ironic, is that I started the book on my Kindle shortly before Hurricane Sandy started raining on our Philadelphia suburb and finished it just as Sandy was moving out and northwestward of what had become our own Fingerbone of a home without power, heat and light surrounded by the soggy and chilly air around us, and left with nothing to distract us from our own memories, thought and dreams- except an exceptionally good book by the best writer in my own middle aged but "relatively" recent experience.

This is a really good debut novel authored by Marilynn Robinson. It was published in 1980 and is a fictional work set in an undetermined time, probably the later 1950s, in a northwestern State, possibly Idaho.The story revolves around three generations of women in a single family. There are parts of this novel I really enjoyed very much. It is extremely well written, however it is not always an "easy read". There were some phisophical passages that I really struggled to follow. This is not necessarily a criticism. But as a reviewer, I feel the need to advise a person looking for a relatively simple, enjoyable reading experience, this was not always the case for me.According to Wikipedia, in 2003 The Guardian Unlimited named "Housekeeping" one of the 100 greatest novels of all time. Years ago I had set upon a quest to read the 100 greatest novels ever written. I found there are many such lists with some, but really little, consensus. I have read hundreds of novels pursuing this quest. With the greatest possible respect to Miss Robinson, this novel does not make my list, although it is a really quality work. It may be simply too sophisticated for me. Thank You...

Ms. Robinson's writing is the antithesis of 20th century American literature. Does it return to the 18th & 19th century where everything an author needs to say is explicitly told word for word leaving us nothing to determine for ourselves? Yes. And yet, the insight is so moving, so deeply personal and so universal, the minimalistic action so unique and common, that what she expresses is truth. I put this book down many times because, as an aficionado of 20th century American literature, it didn't compel me to find out what would happen next. Yet, half way through, I realized I was enamored with the voice, in love with - the lengthy, dare I say "run-on" sentences - the syntax, drawn into exploring the symbolism & other literary devices. And afterall, I was compelled to find out how the story ended and SO SATISFIED & APPRECIATVE that Ms. Robinson had gone to all the trouble of telling us everything, not just showing us the activities, and ensuring we really "got it". Perhaps in a world too large, with exposure to too many perspectives, this is where literature has to go now. If so, Ms. Robinson is leading the way, in the same way Hemingway took literature to the barest, Ms. Robinson is forging a path into the next. And, I am a grateful reader; thank you, Ms. Robinson. Perhaps, this is simply where our culture is now - we need immediate gratification, the answers; we don't have the time nor any longer the will to figure & piece together what the actions say, mean. Perhaps we've evolved - Small minds talk about other people; mediocre minds talk about events; great minds talk about ideas. - and so we need our literature to lead us into grander thoughts & discussion and we can do away with more juvenile aspects of figuring out "what it means". For me literature will always be telling a story or voicing opinion & fact that lead us to relate to others, find common ground and expand our perspectives. Ms. Robinson does so Extremely Well, and will be remembered & studied with the Greatest writers in human history!

pour mon cours de littérature anglaise

Incredibly beautiful prose on the misfits in life. You really feel for the characters, even if you don't identify with them, you can understand them. This book is guaranteed to stay with you.

This is not a realist novel. It is a fantastic novel about female bonding - mothers and daughters, sisters, nieces and aunts - is haunted by losses and yearnings. Ultimately, the two sisters cope differently with their unconventional situation (the image of them opening the house to the flooding of the sea is intriguing), yet the ending suggests that either way (inside or outside of society) does not offer a healing of early wounds.The novel is magical and incredibly sad. It has sentences that are so bleak I was stunned, and scenes that kept me enchanted.

I read this book from the library decades ago and it left a lasting impression.However, I could not remember the title or authors name.Recently I did see it pictured on Bookporn in Reddit. I was excited and immediately bought the Kindle version.I am reading it slowly and savouring every bit of it.The story is set in America and is totally alien to my life growing up. It is fascinating to me.

'Housekeeping' was Marilynne Robinson's first novel, to be followed twenty-four years later by 'Gilead' and then 'Home'. It's a hard book to describe ; the fact is that I have never read another like it. Ruth and Lucille Stone are cared for first by their mother, Helen, in Seattle, then by their grandmother in Fingerbone, a small lakeside town in Idaho (in fact based on Robinson's own home town - as a child - of Sandpoint), then by two aged great-aunts from Spokane, Nona and Lily, and finally by their mother's younger sister, Sylvie. They are accustomed from an early age to fundamental change in their circumstances, sometimes caused by sudden death. Most of the book centres on their time with Sylvie, a transient - that is, a drifter - whom Ruth, the storyteller, quickly identifies as unstable. The 'Housekeeping' of the title at least partly refers to Sylvie's brave attemtps, against her nature, to make a home, to keep house for the two girls and herslf, but the term goes beyond that into ideas of the 'house' we inhabit on earth, our fleshly existence,m and how we deal with that ; our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting. That being so, Sylvie's dreamlike approach to life appears to conform to a kind of reality that 'conventional' life misses. Perhaps she has instinctive insights which express a deeper truth than the orthodox, well-meaning community can recognise. To Ruth, it becomes a pattern which she clings on to (Lucille makes a different choice), though she sometimes finds it bewildering or exasperating. The townspeople of Fingerbone, good people many of them but only occasionally present in the book, certainly are uncomfortable with the way Sylvie behaves, particularly as the guardian of children. If they - the Fingerbone matrons, as we mostly see them - are shadowy figures, the lake and the long railway bridge which crosses it, and the physical reality of Fingerbone and its environs are certainly not. And this is where it becomes difficult to describe this book in anything like an adequate way. There is a story, and there are people, but paragraph after paragraph seems to go beyond them into 'deep' themes of impermanence, moving on, what reality and illusion are - the opposite, perhaps, of what seems obvious to us - memories of past acquaintances and generations lost in time, our own fragility and I don't know what else.The writing is very striking indeed and very beautiful. It is a book that demands to be read with care, slowly, weighing every word. It is full of sentences or groups of sentences which resonate. In my own case, momentary inattention or lack of focus led me to re-read many paragraphs, always with increasing understanding though not always with the satisfaction of having 'got it'. You need to be to be on good reading form when you approach 'Housekeeping'. But there is never any doubt that this is remarkable writing which demands the greatest respect, and it is funny in places, and beautifully descriptive, and wistful and moving. It is full of memorable episodes - for example, the night that Ruth and Lucille spend by the lake in a very uncomfortable makeshift shelter, the theft of the boat by Sylvie and Lucille and their search for the vanished children, the crossing of the bridge at the end (and a very alarming bridge it is!). I can't do justice to this book, and enough has been written about it, much more eloquently and perceptively than this, but it is good beyond imagining, and that seems reason enough for adding a few more words in its praise.