Housekeeping: Marilynne Robinson

   Housekeeping is on the Guardian Unlimited list of the 100 greatest novels of all time.  Time magazine also included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.  After reading it, I understand why.  I only wonder what took me so long to discover it.  The novel is like a intricately faceted jewel and Robinson's poetic language sets the mood for the beautifully haunting story about three generations of women.
     Ruth narrates the story of how she and her younger sister Lucille are raised by a succession of relatives in the fictional town of Fingerbone, Idaho.  First, they are under the care of their maternal grandmother, Sylvia.  When she dies, they fall into the care of Syvia's two bungling sister-in-laws.  They are spinsters who have no practice in or desire for caring for children.  Eventually the girls' aunt Sylvie, their mother's sister, comes to take care of them. Sylvie is a free spirit who has been living as a transient, floating through life.  Sylvie's stability as a caregiver is always in question because of her tendency to dream and wander rather than to engage the practical realities of day-to-day life.
     The novel treats the subject of housekeeping, not only in the domestic sense of cleaning, but in the larger sense of keeping a spiritual home for one's self and family in the face of loss, as the girls experience a series of abandonments as they come of age.  Ruth comes to accept this as an inevitable occurrence:   

Then there is the matter of my mother's abandonment of me. Again, this is the common experience. They walk ahead of us, and walk too fast, and forget us, they are so lost in thoughts of their own, and soon or late they disappear. The only mystery is that we expect it to be otherwise.

     But as Ruth says:   Families will not be broken. Curse and expel them, send their children wandering, drown them in floods and fires, and old women will make songs of all these sorrows and sit on the porch and sing them on mild evenings.
      
     The novel addresses the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transience.  Life for Ruth and Lucille was a constant shifting.  Nothing could be counted on; nothing was stable.  Ruth speaks of this limbo:  

I hated waiting. If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation. I expected — an arrival, an explanation, an apology. There had never been one, a fact I could have accepted, were it not true that, just when I had got used to the limits and dimensions of one moment, I was expelled into the next and made to wonder again if any shapes hit in its shadows.
     
      The small town of Fingerbone is 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 remote little town in which one is aware that the "whole of human history had occurred elsewhere."  The Fosters had always been a thorn in the side of Fingerbone:   

We had been assured by our elders that intelligence was a family trait. All my kin and forebears were people of substantial or remarkable intellect, thought somehow none of them had prospered in the world. Too bookish, my grandmother said with tart pride, and Lucille and I read constantly to forestall criticism, anticipating failure. If my family were not as intelligent as we were pleased to pretend, this was an innocent deception, for it was a matter of indifference to everybody whether we were intelligent or not. People always interpreted our slightly formal manner and our quiet tastes as a sign that we wished to stay a little apart. This was a matter of indifference, also, and we had our wish.
      
     Initially, Syvie and the girls become a close knit group, but as Lucille grows up she comes to dislike their eccentric lifestyle and she moves out.  When town reacts and Ruth's well-being is being questioned by the courts, Sylvie returns to living on the road and takes Ruth with her.
     But the past always haunts us and moving on isn't easy or maybe even possible.  Ruth tells the story years later and ends it wondering about Lucille who she hasn't seen since leaving Fingerbone.  Another loss in a long list, another memory:   

There is so little to remember of anyone - an anecdote, a conversation at a table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming habitual fondness not having meant to keep us waiting long.

     Housekeeping is worth reading for the language alone, but the story rich and engaging, as well.  An excellent read!

~ Frances