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Housekeeping: A Novel
by Marilynne Robinson

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<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11741.Housekeeping_A_Novel?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="Housekeeping: A Novel" border="0" src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/photo.goodreads.com/books/1166485699m/11741.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11741.Housekeeping_A_Novel?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">Housekeeping: A Novel</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7491.Marilynne_Robinson">Marilynne Robinson</a> 
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5626494?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a>
 rating: 4 of 5 stars 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.
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/325123?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>

Meagan's review
rating:

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 od...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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message 1: by Heather

09/10/2007 07:34AM

It's been several years since I read this, but I agree 100% with your praise and your reservations. Even though Robinson's prose knocks you out, her vision seems eerily still or even wan. Like you say, Housekeeping lacks felicity or humor. I buy into Robinson's claims about quiet joys, but geez, the characters are more spectral than flesh.