Housekeeping
Marilynne Robinson(1980)
Extract
My name is Ruth. I grew up with my younger sister, Lucille, under the care of my grandmother, Mrs. Sylvia Foster, and when she died, of her sisters-in-law.
A lake lies at the centre of a small Idaho town, and the lake has taken things: a train full of passengers, a mother who drove off the cliff, and the settled world of two young girls. Marilynne Robinson published this novel in 1980, and its prose carries the chill and clarity of mountain water. Ruth and Lucille are raised by relatives until their aunt Sylvie arrives, a drifter whose presence dissolves the boundary between shelter and wilderness, between keeping house and letting it go. Robinson writes about loss not as event but as element, something one lives inside the way one lives inside weather. The novel asks whether a life shaped by absence might be not ruin but a wilder fidelity to what the world actually is.
If you loved this
Thoreau chose the same deliberate drift toward the margins, but Robinson gives it to two girls instead of a philosopher.
Brontë fills the same cold landscape with the same wild grief, and the house is just as unable to hold it.
Woolf writes the same elegy for a house and the mother who held it together, and the light is just as fragile.