Housekeeping's
title suggests it's about sweeping away dust bunnies and wiping up
stains, but while keeping a house clean and well running does figure in
the plot, "housekeeping" here means more: keeping a house, being
rooted. Ruthie and Lucille live in the house their grandfather built in
the Idaho town where the lake claimed him (a train accident) and their
mother (a suicide). The latter had thoughtfully left them with their
grandmother before she drove off a cliff into the lake. Their
grandmother raises them conscientiously for five years until she dies.
Then two dotty great-aunts give child rearing a try before calling in
the girls' Aunt Sylvie.
Sylvie's eccentricities accumulate as the story progresses. She sleeps
with her shoes on. She opens windows and lets leaves pile up in corners
and bats fly in. She feeds the girls haphazardly. She is unfazed by
their playing hooky from school. They figure out that Aunt Sylvie is a
drifter — she hasn't had a house to keep. Ruthie, the
narrator
and the less self-defined of the two, is intrigued. Lucille is ashamed.
She wants to be like other people. As the story unfolds, the girls take
different paths in their response to Sylvie. Ruthie grows in
self-awareness and spiritual depth even as she ends up — by
choice — without a home. She is able to see and take
advantage of
the possibilities of an unconventional life.
Marilynne Robinson's writing is like poetry — lush and
metaphoric. Her poetic meanderings can sometimes drift away from the
plot lines for several pages, which might be irritating to readers who
want to get on with it, but skipping the lyrical passages would be a
loss.
This book about abandonment and survival, transience and tolerance,
trying to find one's place in society — or not wanting to
—
received the PEN/Hemingway Award for best first novel and was nominated
for the Pulitzer Prize. It would be another 23 years before Robinson
published her second novel, Gilead,
which did win the Pulitzer Prize. Despite the small
production, Robinson is considered one of America's best writers.
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