Book Of The Month: Housekeeping
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““To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing — the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.” ”
The above words set the tone for the tragic work of art that is Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. It is a modern classic published in 1987, detailing a tale of deep loneliness, growth, loss, and transition. It follows two young sisters, Ruth and Lucille, who are orphaned at a young age and fall under the care of different relatives who aren’t able to provide the stable environment of home, love, and security that they so very evidently need and crave.
Housekeeping
Originally Published: 1987
Pages: 352
Available on: Kindle, Paperback, Hardcover, Audiobook
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The girls spend their youth in a quiet, forgotten town, on the banks of the frozen lake responsible for their tragic existence. These dark waters swallowed their grandfather in a history-making trainwreck when his train went off the rails into its murky depths, and these greedy waters also swallowed their distant, inexplicable mother, who drove her car off the curbs quite intentionally. Here by these eerie shores, they grow first with their very disciplined and straightforward grandmother, then their two incompetent and unwilling great-aunts, and finally, their gypsy-souled aunt Sylvie.
Sylvie is not of this world, having come from a life of nomadic transience where she collects trinkets, wears her coat to bed, finds herself at the train station reading the train schedule, conforms to no social norms, and while not actively seeking estrangement from the small town’s society, certainly gives no indication that she seeks or cares one whit about their acceptance of herself. She is a mysterious figure that does provide some very limited security for the girls, but her own impermanent nature is too deep-rooted to offer the stability that the children need.
““Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.” ”
These three characters and their doomed failure to build a home together constitute the majority of the novel; their different natures come to odds, and how they fluctuate and reciprocate with one another is the intriguing force of the novel. They attempt to make a home but are haunted by the shadows and memories of their dead loved ones and are alienated by their individual inner demons. Over time, their inability to share a similar perspective on loss and loneliness drives them apart.
Housekeeping lures readers in with haunting themes of abandonment, displacement, and deep longing for a home and family.
““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’s writing is quiet and shockingly beautiful; her poetic prose runs like deep water throughout the story. Her dramatic verbiage and graceful ponderings on the displacement of people and their deep desires sets the tone of the novel to be eerie and pensive. Reading this thoughtful narrative feels like deja-vu, like sleepwalking. Her words have a penetrating effect and are certainly one of the best aspects of this novel. It is worthwhile to read Housekeeping just to experience Robinson’s delicate and artistic articulation.
As the name of the novel suggests, much of the thematic material in the book revolves around the significance of a home and belonging somewhere. The two girls have a physical home for their entire childhood but never feel at place in it, never feel taken care of, and never feel fulfilled in their desire for a family unit.
They are bounced from relative to relative, struggling to give and accept the limited love that each caretaker attempts to provide them in varied ways. The girls feel like ships at sea without a port: lost, unwanted, listless, forgotten. What takes root and breaks them apart is the way that the two have very different approaches to coping and handling tragedy.
Ruth, the younger, floats as if in a waking dream; she never seems fully present or recovered from her past, and truthfully, seems like she never will. She was born, lived, and seems to be destined for a transitory, dream-like existence that only barely scratches the surface of reality. She stands apart from the rest of the world and society, makes no effort to rejoin or reconnect, and lacks both the desire and natural ability to do so.
This deep loneliness and lack of love and connection with others is Ruth’s deepest sorrow, and this creature’s lonely experience and aching displacement will have a reader’s heart twisted in empathy. The following quote describes Ruth perfectly:
“ ”It was a source of both terror and comfort to me then that I often seemed invisible — incompletely and minimally existent, in fact. It seemed to me that I made no impact on the world, and that in exchange I was privileged to watch it unawares.” ”
Lucille, on the other hand, depicts the other end of the spectrum, the alternative to fading and caving into sorrow and longing. She takes her burdens, shoulders them boldy, selfishly, and unrelentingly, and does her best to make a more “normal” life out of the hand she has been dealt. Unlike her gentle and soft little sister, Lucille applies a headstrong and ruthless determination to interject herself back into society and places importance on clothes, societal standing, and more social endeavors. Having been abandoned, she refuses to remain a victim, but she is not necessarily happier, better, or more fulfilled for it. It is plain that Lucille’s choices are selfish, and yet—readers cannot really condemn her.
The black-and-white difference between the two girls drives a stake between their relationship, increasingly widening the distance between them. The days they used to spend by the water, casting stones, wandering through the woods, wondering about their place in the world (or lack of it), slip by, and it is evident the two girls will walk very different roads in life, forever.’
This adolescent perspective on loss, transition, and growth, of how to build a life out of a hazy beginning and a wrecked household will move any reader.
““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 hid in its shadows.””
If you enjoy this novel by Robison, consider reading another of her immensely popular and Pulitzer Prize-winning works, Gilead, detailing the intimate reflections of a dying preacher. You should definitely read Housekeeping if you enjoy deep, thought-provoking pieces of dramatic fiction; anyone can benefit from picking this novel up. Housekeeping was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for best first novel.