Housekeeping

As a writer, every time I read Marilynne Robinson, I am equal parts inspired and discouraged, because her prose and character development are so amazing and I'll never be that good. Most will never be that good.

“Housekeeping” is an expertly crafted tale of abandonment, isolation, and transience. It is captivating but something you'll want to read slowly to savor every word, phrase, and description.

★ ★ ★ ★ 1/2 (rounded up)
This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader as part of the United States of Books Project.
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It's time for my home state here in this little series we're doing: Idaho, featuring the book Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. Set in the fictional town of Fingerbone, in the Northern part of the state, about 50-60 miles from the Canadian border (not information from the book, that's just me trying to orient those of you looking at a map).

Lucille, and her older sister Ruth, are raised in the same house their mother grew up in. We're told straight away that following their mother's death they lived with their grandmother, then her two sisters, and finally their mother's younger sister. The circumstances surrounding these transitions are revealed gradually – none of the adults in their lives were cut out for parenting (Grandmother was at one point, and probably would've sufficed if she hadn't died).

This is not a plot-driven book, and it's hard to talk about what plot there is without telling you everything – so I'll be vague. Ruth tells us about her grandfather's death; them coming to live in his old house; life with grandmother, great-aunts, and aunt; and then things really start happening as she and Lucille enter adolescence and I'm not going to ruin anything by finishing this sentence properly. On page 27, I wrote “this text is so beautiful, I don't care what happens, I'm going to love this book.” Thankfully, I was right – because once things happened, I really didn't like it – but I loved reading the book. There are other characters in the book, but they're of so little importance, I'm not going to say anything beyond acknowledging their existence. The focus is on the girls, their family and the really old house i which they all reside.

Thematically, this book is about loneliness, family ties, waiting for someone/something. I'm not sure there's much difference in Ruth's mind between loneliness and waiting (nor am I that sure that there's much difference in my mind between them as I write this). For young girls to have this much upheaval in their parental figure(s), loneliness and loss are going to loom large in their psycho-social development – and they're not going to respond the same way to things. You add some pretty perceptive thoughts about loneliness to Robinson's prose and you've got yourself a winner of a book.

So what do we learn about Idaho here? Nothing. Fingerbone could be any small city/large town in the U.S. There is nothing distinctive Idaho about this book. Well, almost nothing. There's a lot of mentioning of local place names (mostly cities, incidentally, that most non-Idahoans are going to mispronounce) – enough so that we all know that Fingerbone is just Sandpoint's nom de plume, but that's as “Idaho” as we get here. Take out the local names and this could be in any state that has lakes, forests and railroads – which pretty much covers all 50, right? I don't know why Robinson didn't just use the actual town's name – but, whatever. The fact that Entertainment Weekly thinks this novel “best defines” Idaho probably says more about the dearth of books set here than anything else.

Lyrical, haunting, insightful, beautiful – this is prose that'll stick with you. I didn't like the ending, but it worked and was earned, so I can get over it. Don't worry about the story, focus on the telling of it and you'll likely agree, this is stunning stuff.

A decidedly imperfect childhood is at the center of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping. Ruth, and her sister Lucille, don't have much if anything in way of memories of their father. They are raised by their mother, Helen, until one day she leaves where she's been living and returns to Fingerbone, Idaho, where she was raised by her own single mother (her father died during her childhood when the train on which he worked derailed into the local lake). She arranges her daughters on her mother's porch with a box of crackers and promptly drives her car off a cliff. The girls have some stability with their grandmother for a time, but then she dies. At first, grandma's two sisters-in-law come to take care of the kids, but as longtime spinsters, they're not quite up to the task. So then Sylvie, their aunt, comes to town. And that's when things start to change.

Sylvie is...a drifter, to be polite. She's actually more of a hobo. She likes the girls, loves them in her own way even, but it's hard for her to create a stable home for them. She can't break out of old habits: riding around in train boxcars, falling asleep with her shoes still on in case she needs to be able to move along, hoarding. While Ruth takes after her aunt, Lucille doesn't. As the girls enter the teenage years, Lucille wants normality. She breaks away from the family, and as she talks about what's going on back home, outside interest increases dramatically. This strains things to the breaking point and forces Ruth to make a decision about who she really is and who she really wants to be.

The more I read, the more I boil books down to three essential elements: plot, characters, and writing. A good book has two, a great book has all three. Robinson's writing is lovely, her prose clear and insightful and strong. But the other two legs of this stool aren't really there. Despite being told from Ruth's perspective, we never get much of a sense of who she really is. Her sister, despite being her closest companion, doesn't get much development either apart from wanting a more conventional life. Even Sylvie is elusive, even though you get a better sense of her than you do almost anyone else. As for the plot...despite being a coming-of-age novel, it seems almost more like a failure-to-come-of-age novel. Ruth never really grows or changes. She just...drifts along, like a leaf along a river. A rootless child, she follows her rootless aunt/guardian. Even her break with her sister, what should have been a deeply traumatic experience, feels anticlimatic and muffled, somehow. Since there was quite a long gap between this book, published in the 80s, and Robinson's next work, Gilead, not published until the early 2000s, I'm still interested in reading more of her works. Maybe that long gap helped her develop a better sense of people or plotting? This book, though, isn't quite good enough to recommend.

Robinson achieves something fairly rare in this novel–although her second effort, Gilead is an even more stunning example of it–each character, both large and small, is treated with the utmost compassion. Things move slowly, this being the Midwest, but everything is beautiful. Really, quite a treat.