Housekeeping: A Novel

by Marilynne Robinson

Housekeeping: A Novel

published	November 1st 2004 by Picador
first published	1980
binding	Paperback
isbn	0312424094 (isbn13: 9780312424091)
ebook
pages	224
description	A modern classic, Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their com...more [close] A modern classic, Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, their eccentric and remote aunt. The family house is in the small Far West town of Fingerbone 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 town "chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere." Ruth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transience. [close]
date added	12-18-06 edit book

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Amanda

Amanda rated it:

07/07/07

bookshelves: read_summer_07

Read in May, 2007

You thought I was going to rant about housekeeping, the activity, not the book.

This is a reflection on the book, not of the activity. Though, Thursday we are cleaning house and I might have some more OCD tips for you.

Time Magazine named Housekeeping one of the 100 All Time Novels.

I wouldn't go so far.

Please don't misunderstand me, it's a quite lovely novel about two sisters coming of age and negotiating their roles in society--what is proper and what isn't. Additionally, the them...more

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laura

laura rated it:

10/07/07

bookshelves: beautiful, fiction, hushed, strange

Read in October, 2005

written in exquisite detail, as everyone has noted, but a lot of the rest of what's been written in the more recent reviews i find sort of troubling, and, in my opinion, misleading. recommended for 'women who like descriptive writing'? gross. this novel was given to me by a dude, and further recommended by a (male) writer i know (who counts ernest hemingway as a favorite author) as one of the best novels of the 20th century. this is not a frivolous book-- a bauble for sighing females.

a b...more written in exquisite detail, as everyone has noted, but a lot of the rest of what's been written in the more recent reviews i find sort of troubling, and, in my opinion, misleading. recommended for 'women who like descriptive writing'? gross. this novel was given to me by a dude, and further recommended by a (male) writer i know (who counts ernest hemingway as a favorite author) as one of the best novels of the 20th century. this is not a frivolous book-- a bauble for sighing females.

a book at it's best is a revelation. it reveals things by a particular kind of description. marilynne robinson's 'housekeeping' is a revelation, of lonliness in particular, and of transience (two qualities more typically (if erroneously) attributed to males than females). it resonates less, as far as i'm concerned as a girl-comes-of-age story or as a tale of sisterly bonds. it's about a person trying to make it in a family trying to make it in a town trying to make it in this world-- about the survival strategies of each, about how things just keep going, keep trying to make it (or stop trying, and why).

albert camus wrote that "there is but one serious philosophical problem and that is suicide"--why we should and shouldn't go on living. robinson, of course, is a novelist, not a philosopher, and great novelists aren't so much in the business of showing us why we should or shouldn't, but of how (and sometimes why) we do or don't. 'housekeeping' is nothing less than a narrative account of this most profound and universally relevant fact: the fact that we keep going, or we that we don't, and how we do, or don't (and sometimes why).

***

there was not a soul there but knew how shallow-rooted the whole town was. it flooded yearly, and had burned once. often enough the lumber mill shut down, or burned down. there were reports that things were otherwise elsewhere, and anyone, on a melancholy evening, might feel that fingerbone was a meager and difficult place.

so a diaspora threatened always. and there is no living creature, though the whims of eons had put its eyes on boggling stalks and clampled it in a carapace, dimished it to a pinpoint and given it a taste for mud and stuck it down a well or hid it under a stone, but that creature will live on if it can. so fingerbone, which despite all its difficultes sometimes seemed pleasant and ordinary, would value itelf, too, and live on if and as it could. so every wanderer whose presence suggested it might be as well to drift, or it could not matter much, was met with something that seemed at first sight a moral reaction, since morality is a check upon the strongest temptations.

marilynne robinson
'housekeeping'...less

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Meagan

Meagan rated it:

09/09/07

Read in September, 2007

I have 25 pages left of this book, and so I will refrain from granting stars for now. But I felt the need to stop and take a breath before I stay up too late tonight to finish it. This is perhaps the most acute and beautiful portrait of life's fragility and sometimes cruel, sometimes indifferent contingencies that I have ever read. Being with Ruthie, the narrator, for too long makes me begin to feel as if my confidence that everything and everyone I love dearly will still be there in the morning...more I have 25 pages left of this book, and so I will refrain from granting stars for now. But I felt the need to stop and take a breath before I stay up too late tonight to finish it. This is perhaps the most acute and beautiful portrait of life's fragility and sometimes cruel, sometimes indifferent contingencies that I have ever read. Being with Ruthie, the narrator, for too long makes me begin to feel as if my confidence that everything and everyone I love dearly will still be there in the morning is absurd, and asking to be shattered. As you can imagine, reading this book is uncomfortable. To say the least.

Ruthie's grandfather died when a train fell off a bridge into a cold, deep lake. Her mother dropped her and her sister off at their grandmother's house one morning to drive a borrowed car into the same lake. Her grandmother died a few years later. And now she lives with a mysterious drifter of an aunt who seems tempted to succumb to the lake - or a passing freight train- at any odd quiet moment.

Every page of Ruthie's narration is infused with longing and wonder at all that has been lost. She feels the pain of absence (and a long absence's tricks on memory) with such ferocity that the dead are almost with her. This is the passage about how Ruthie's grief and longing for her mother has evolved that made me gasp and then cry just a few pages ago:

It was so very long since the dark had swum her hair, and there was nothing more to dream of but often she almost slipped through any door I saw from the side of my eye, and it was she, and not changed, and not perished. She was a music I no longer heard, that rang in my mind, itself and nothing else, lost to all sense, but not perished, not perished.

Or this, an observation somehow drawn from Ruthie's encounter with a crumbling lonely house in the woods:

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.

Is this the only hope that Ruthie can squeeze from her bleak and transient world? Is the only respite from longing the proximity it gives us to the thing that is lost? There is such pain, and so little comfort. Certainly as a reader one cannot avoid yearning for her own losses, and touching Ruthie's cold hand in doing so. I feel privileged to witness Ruthie's childhood. But I cannot fully buy into this joyless, humorless world - though the prose is perfect, and honest - I do think that great losses cannot completely barricade out life's pleasures and jokes, sensory brilliance and small generosities.

But I'm not finished yet - perhaps some colors other than gray and white will shine forth before I fall asleep tonight....less

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Juli

Juli rated it:

06/11/07

bookshelves: fiction, top10

Read in April, 2006

recommends it for: patient readers who can appreciates the intricacy of an amazing writer

Written twenty years prior to her Pulitzer Prize winning novel Gilead, Housekeeping outperforms any debut I've managed to come across. Composed at the age of thirty-seven, it feels Robinson has been storing up this novel her whole life, only to wait until the characters fully reveal themselves and the story unweaves completely before contemplating its production.

Housekeeping tells the story of two sisters, Ruth and Lucille, thrown a mileu of guardians over a period of a few years. First, the...more Written twenty years prior to her Pulitzer Prize winning novel Gilead, Housekeeping outperforms any debut I've managed to come across. Composed at the age of thirty-seven, it feels Robinson has been storing up this novel her whole life, only to wait until the characters fully reveal themselves and the story unweaves completely before contemplating its production.

Housekeeping tells the story of two sisters, Ruth and Lucille, thrown a mileu of guardians over a period of a few years. First, their mother, who keeps a less than tidy urban residence in Seattle. She then drives them to their grandmother's in the tiny village of Fingerbone, where she proceeds to drive her car into the same lake where her father drowned years prior. The girls' housekeepers then switch hands again once their grandmother passes away, to a pair of whispering fidgety great aunts. Finally, Sylvie, their estranged aunt, becomes their fourth and final housekeeper for the duration of the novel. What happens in the next two-hundred pages or so is not quite the typical coming of age story, although does preserve the most precious elements of such.

The two sisters seem to posses the same body during the first half of the novel, maintaining the consistent "we" this and "we" that. This is so carefully done that its presence is mildly unnoticed until a disruption in its pattern occurs, marked by the sisters' drifting.

Robinson's mastery of language reveals itself in the scenes unfolded across the pages of this textually rich excursion, as she paints backdrops in which to vividly place her characters.

“The town itself seemed a negligible thing from such a distance. Were it not for the clutter on the shore, the flames and the tremulous pillars of heat that stood above the barrels, and of course the skaters who swooped and sailed and made bright, brave sounds, it would have been possible not to notice the town at all. The mountains that stood up behind it were covered with snow and hidden in the white sky, and the lake was sealed and hidden, yet their eclipse had not made the town more prominent. Indeed, where we were we could feel the reach of the lake far behind us, and far beyond us on either side, in a spacious silence that seemed to ring like glass."

One note of caution to the indolent reader: this book will make you work. I advise keeping a dictionary handy alongside this novel. I filled up three notecards (front and back) with words like "unifery", "simulacra" and "obstreperous". Once the formidable text is moiled through however, the reader will become infinitely rewarded by the tranquil melody that carries them through the novel, depositing them at a conclusion well merited and ultimately, completely satiating.

...less

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Nick

Nick rated it:

07/13/08

Read in July, 2008

I'm going to throw the gauntlet down and say that I thought this book was terribly overrated considering how many of my friends--whose taste I've come to respect--recommended it to me. All the critics from 1980 seemed amazed that this was a debut. Seemed like a first novel to me.

The thing that people praise most about the book was the beauty of her language. I'll admit that there were some wonderful passages, and some great imagery, but there was just as much "writerly" prose, over...more I'm going to throw the gauntlet down and say that I thought this book was terribly overrated considering how many of my friends--whose taste I've come to respect--recommended it to me. All the critics from 1980 seemed amazed that this was a debut. Seemed like a first novel to me.

The thing that people praise most about the book was the beauty of her language. I'll admit that there were some wonderful passages, and some great imagery, but there was just as much "writerly" prose, overwritten prose, pyrite prose. I felt like I was possessed by the spirit George Orwell as again and again I read poor word choices: "achromatic" for "colorless;" "simulacra" for "semblance." These words are not poetic substitutes but verge on jargon. Blandishment? Come on. That's about as poetic as "esophagus."

I also thought the philosophical meanderings of Ruthie bordered on pretentiousness: "So memory pulls us forward, so prophecy is only brilliant memory--there will be a garden where all of us as one child will sleep in our mother Eve, hooped in her ribs and staved by her spine." Whenever it appeared, this vague, didactic prose seemed to stifle what little story there was. And let's not forget that these ideas could never have come from the mind of Ruthie, teen aged or aged. One who spends her days trying desperately to be ignored and can barely speak does not later become a meditator on memory and the Garden of Eden.

I probably would have been more forgiving of the novel in these aspects if I thought there was a strong story. There is not. Rather, Robinson decided that a gauzy, limp tale of loss would preclude the need for any kind sustained dramatic tension. We are treated to uninspiring characters with no real redeeming qualities. The only dynamo in the story is Lucille and because of her conforming attitude, we are distanced from identifying with her. Instead, we get to hang out with Ruthie, the world's most inactive protagonist.

Now, I will qualify everything. I will say that I did enjoy chapters 4-8. I actually enjoyed them a lot. The conflict between the two sisters was wonderful. But a good middle does not make a good book. The first two chapters were all but unnecessary--drawn out exposition that could easily have been woven into the rest of the book--and the ending just fell flat. What was Robinson trying to say? That grief makes you drift? That the power of memory can drag you towards oblivion? I think my frustration stems partly from dashed hopes that the ending would unite and triumph. Instead, I was left with a handful of images, nothing more. ...less

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Robert

Robert rated it:

09/09/07

BE CAREFUL WHAT

A crusty complaint: the preponderance of the simple declarative sentence in current fiction. I bore many friends with this. Is this or Minimalism or Postmodernism? I’m sorry: not up on my “isms.” I lfavor long lush sentences that take me to a couple different places before bringing me home to the point, even if ithe trip was a bit tortured or author smug: “This is what I can do.”
Certainly, simple open prose can be a fine thing when done well:
“She had a one-pi...more BE CAREFUL WHAT

A crusty complaint: the preponderance of the simple declarative sentence in current fiction. I bore many friends with this. Is this or Minimalism or Postmodernism? I’m sorry: not up on my “isms.” I lfavor long lush sentences that take me to a couple different places before bringing me home to the point, even if ithe trip was a bit tortured or author smug: “This is what I can do.”
Certainly, simple open prose can be a fine thing when done well:
“She had a one-piece bathing suit, the same one every day,
and an abortion that fall.”
What Salter does here (when read in context of course) would take me a page.
I admit that part of my problem is that I don’t know what’s been done here, or how it’s been done. I can’t for the life of me write lines like this. However, I do find that if the writing isn’t this magical, if – for whatever reason – I get pulled out of the story, I become overly aware of the meter. It becomes annoying and doggerel-like.
I like to find the complex musicality of Elliot (TS) even in the prose I read, and find it best in the longer line.

So when I started to read Housekeeping I was overjoyed to find myself lost in lush, lyrical prose. This is beautiful writing. She draws from an indefatigable well of imagery
and this novel is as tight as any short story. There is also a quirkiness to the characters
that adds some necessary humor. This was a relief, as there was none in Gilead, and it could have used it.
The setting—the town—in this story is wonderfully quaint, and reminiscent of an Alice Munro town.

But the novel is too dense. The description is too lush and becomes cloying. Even the simplest act is overly-described. (A marshmallow has its “soft underbelly” pierced.)
The story is a fable and in this regard the writing works. The description becomes magical in a tale that has orphaned children, a free spirit, and dark woods. But Robinson also makes this a Bible tale. (Jonah gets great play.) This worked in Gilead, as the protagonist is a minister, but here it clashes. Often, when the author pauses for summary, she takes a step too far out of the story and sermonizes.

I wish I’d liked this more. My friend Patrick suggested that it works if read in one go, as he did.
Perhaps.
...less

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Corina

Corina rated it:

08/18/08

bookshelves: feminism, literature

I've heard that Robinson wrote this book in response to Moby Dick. Some professor once claimed that a "masculine" book like Moby Dick alienates women because it has so few female characters; allegedly, Robinson, who didn't feel at all alienated by Moby Dick, set out to write a "feminine" novel that would not alienate male readers. I also heard she worked on Housekeeping in private, for her own pleasure, for a long time before it was published. Since I first read this book as ...more I've heard that Robinson wrote this book in response to Moby Dick. Some professor once claimed that a "masculine" book like Moby Dick alienates women because it has so few female characters; allegedly, Robinson, who didn't feel at all alienated by Moby Dick, set out to write a "feminine" novel that would not alienate male readers. I also heard she worked on Housekeeping in private, for her own pleasure, for a long time before it was published. Since I first read this book as a teenager I've foisted it upon most people that I take a liking to and I'm constantly running out of copies to give away. It's one of the few books I've read by a living writer that I consider a masterpiece.

It's interesting that so many of the negative reviews on this site complain that the novel is slow, lacks plot, that it collapses under the weight of its own philosophy...all this could be said of Moby Dick. Robinson writes from within the 19th century transcendalist tradition, and I believe she puts such precise and ponderous language into Ruthie's voice quite deliberately; how could an inarticulate, dreamy adolescent describe her world in those terms? There is a fault somewhere in the narrator's reliability - one theory is that Lucille is the real narrator, imagining Ruthie's story - another is that Ruthie narrates as a ghost. Like so much of the novel, there is a hole at the center where much remains unknowable.

This novel is heartbreakingly beautiful and persistently dark. At the plot level it can be reduced to a slow-moving coming of age story about some eccentric youngsters and their aunt, but reading it that way would be like reading Moby Dick as a slow-moving fishing story.

***FYI for everyone in the Philly area this September, Robinson is speaking at the Free Library - details below.***

event: Marilynne Robinson
date: September 26, 2008 07:30PM
location: Free Library, 1901 Vine, Philadelphia, PA, United States
description: If you live anywhere near Philly and have read Robinson's unearthly book "Housekeeping" you should come to this lecture! If you haven't read Housekeeping, you have a month to catch up. Unfortunately, this isn't a free author event - it's $14, $7 for students. I think Marilynne Robinson is one of the few living literary geniuses in the US, I'm ecstatic that she's coming to Philly. ...less

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Sara

Sara rated it:

02/04/08

bookshelves: fiction

Read in February, 2008

There is excellent writing. And then there is excellent plotting and storytelling. And if you are very lucky, you will get all of these elements in a single book. This is not that book!

That said, it is a very beautiful read. Robinson clearly takes delight in writing for the sake of writing, and her sentences are thoughtful and extensive and remind me a bit of watching a droplet of water make its way down a pane of glass - it twists and turns and is unpredictable in its path. So I give Housek...more

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Lucy

Lucy rated it:

01/02/08

Read in December, 2007

Marilynne Robinson is the author of Gilead, which is a very popular book among readers this season, and just to be that much different (I know... I'm such a stand-out), I read her previous novel, which came as highly recommended.

I can see why book lovers like her. She vividly details each scene. Suddenly, a page is full of the texture of the bedspread and the lighting in the room and the placement of the shoes on a certain side of the bed. But said with such description that you imagine it p...more

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Kate

Kate rated it:

12/11/07

bookshelves: books-i-own, chick-lit-women-s-lit, classics, favorite-books, fiction, the-100-in-2007

Read in February, 2007

A winner of the Pen Hemingway Award, Housekeeping is the story of Ruthie and Lillian, two girls left orphaned when their mother drives herself off a cliff and into a river. They move in with their grandmother, who promptly dies and leaves the girls to the care of their two aunts, who are so anxious and nervous that they call upon the girls' mother's sister. Sylvie comes into town and immediately the girls lives are transformed. Not necessarily for the better. Eventually Lillian leaves and goes t...more

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Tim

Tim rated it:

02/04/08

bookshelves: modern-fiction

Read in January, 2008

My first introduction to Robinson’s work was reading Gilead, which I enjoyed. Reading the jacket of Housekeeping, I wasn’t sure it was something I would enjoy or seek out. However, it was a great read, a novel crafted with care and a superb attention to detail. The arc of the story revolves around two sisters who are orphaned to their grandmother when their mother commits suicide. Life is relatively calm until the grandmother passes away, at which point an estranged aunt comes to take c...more

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Inder

Inder rated it:

06/25/08

bookshelves: 20th-century, alltimefaves, audiobooks, fiction, read-2008, women

Read in April, 2008

recommended to Inder by: Elizabeth
recommends it for: Women

Argh. Gorgeous. A really lovely novel, I enjoyed this immensely. While being less intellectual overall than Gilead, it is nonetheless, at times, more abstract and difficult.

A moody setting, a moody novel, with a narrator who borders on mental instability, but speaks with the clear voice of truth.

Whereas Gilead is about men, especially fathers and sons, Housekeeping is about women, especially sisters. And the pains of growing up, and of loss and grief, and the relationships we maintain ...more

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Leigh

Leigh rated it:

01/07/08

Read in December, 2007

recommended to Leigh by: Entertainment Weekly
recommends it for: people who don't have better books to read

Housekeeping is a book about a girl named Ruth who has a crappy childhood. Ruth and her sister Lucille are cared for their grandmother after their mother's suicide. When the grandmother dies, the girls are taken care of by two rather ridiculous great aunts, and then finally by their eccentric (perhaps to the point of mental illness) Aunt Sylvie. Our narrator looks back on her childhood, piecing together the events that shaped it and molded her into who she would become.

This book was extreme...more

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Tung

Tung rated it:

01/09/08

Read in January, 2007

I enjoyed Gilead so much, I picked up Robinson’s first novel. The book is another first-person narrative, but this time from the perspective of a young woman named Ruth. Ruth and her younger sister Lucille were raised by their grandmother after their mother committed suicide, and then by their eccentric aunt Sylvie after their grandmother passes away. By eccentric, I mean Sylvie’s way out there. She spends her time wandering around, speaking to strange characters at bus stations, sitting i...more

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Bart

Bart rated it:

07/28/07

Read in July, 2007

recommends it for: Women who love descriptive writing

Investor Warren Buffett has said, "That which is not worth doing is not worth doing well."

So then, are those characters which are not worth writing about worth writing about brilliantly?

That was the question this book left me asking. Essentially, this book can be reduced to the coming-of-age of two sisters and an eccentric aunt. The author deserves little credit for character development because her two main characters, to whom she subjects an odd and tragic childhood, eventu...more

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Kristen

Kristen added it

02/07/08

Read in January, 2000

This novel touched me deeply... This first novel by Marilynne Robinson is so incredible and the language is so beautiful that I would read passages over and over again just to savor the words. The novel speaks to the heart and soul about the transitory state that our lives exemplify, while touching on our expectations and their consequences on our experiences of life.

Not only is it a story about transiency but of sisters. This is the story of two sisters, Ruthie and Lucille. The girls' m...more

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Kathy

Kathy rated it:

03/28/08

bookshelves: fiction, reviewed

Read in March, 2008

I picked this book up by accident. It was on the "staff picks" section at Books Inc. on Van Ness (used to be a Clean Well Lighted Place For Books), but once I started reading it I realized this was the same author who wrote Gilead which I'd tried to read for about 2 months before giving up. I felt annoyed, but read on.

The slow, soft spoken pace of Robinson's writing in Gilead is apparent in Housekeeping too, but Housekeeping managed to maintain my interest. And bec...more

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Mary Ellen

Mary Ellen rated it:

09/30/07

Read in September, 2007

recommends it for: people who value impeccable prose over plot

I wish I liked this book more than I did; I feel it is a book one should love, since it is so beautifully written. The descriptions are powerful, each word is meticulously chosen, the themes -- family, impermanence, loss -- universal and moving. But in the end, something felt a bit off-kilter. I think it was the voice of the narrator. [READ NO FURTHER IF YOU DON'T WANT PLOT SPOILED!]

The story traces Ruthie's life through a series of rather distant, even neglectful caretakers to her eve...more

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Suzanne

Suzanne rated it:

08/16/07

Read in August, 2007

I'm not even sure that this would be in my "favorite" books, although it should be. I'd like to say I wish I'd written it, but I know that I wouldn't have. What I will say is that it is complex, well-written, and surprisingly, a fast read.

Marilynne Robinson manages to capture all of life, quite shrewdly and by all initial appearances, objectively. She saves everything which cannot be saved.

Her descriptions of nature are fresh and beautiful:

"The absolute black of the...more

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Karen

Karen rated it: