Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson, 1980
Speaking of the Pulitzers, Marilynne Robinson’s first novel, Housekeeping,was a finalist for the Pulitzer, and Gilead, her second novel, won the Pulitzer in 2005, while Home, her third, won the Orange Prize and other awards. I loved both Gilead and Home, but had never read Housekeeping.
“My name is Ruth,” the story begins. “I grew up under the care of my grandmother, Mrs. Sylvia Foster, and when she died, of her sisters-in-law, Misses Lily and Nona Foster, and when they fled, of her daughter, Mrs. Sylvia Fisher. Through all these generations of elders we lived in one house, my grandmother’s house, built for her by her husband, Edmund Foster, an employee of the railroad, who escaped this world years before I entered it. It was he who put us down in this unlikely place.” The story covers Ruth’s and her sister Lucille’s growing-up years in their strange little house in the tiny far-West town of Fingerbone, ID, with a kind of first-person omniscient narrative. The house, the town, and especially the vast, forbidding glacial lake at the edge of town feel like characters themselves. Ruthie’s narration can be microscopically observant. Here, she remembers the effect of spring weather on the impractical shoes Aunt Sylvie bought them:
“Though the mud in the road still stood inches high and gleamed like aspic on either side where tires passed through the ruts, I had liked the slippers well enough. The tingling seep of water through the (slippers’) seams was pleasant on a spring day, when even in broad sun the slightest breeze raised the hairs on our arms.”
The novel is dense with strange, beautiful images, especially of the lake. Catastrophic flooding, suicide, and death are recurring themes, as is abandonment – the two young sisters are repeatedly abandoned, by their father, mother, grandmother, great aunts, and possibly by their aunt Sylvie’s unbalancedness. It’s dark, with a few funny moments – anyone with a small-town Midwestern or Western background will recognize the self-justifying dialogue of the two great-aunts, which made me laugh out loud. The novel’s ending includes a scene of destruction, though not what I’d expected, and a daring escape. Housekeepingfeels both innovative and old-fashioned (Faulknerian, maybe?), both dense and slight – at a little over 200 pages, it’s much shorter than Robinson’s two later novels. It’s a beautiful, strange story, worth a read and then a re-read.
Click here for a great interview with Robinson in The Guardian, post-Orange Prize.