HOUSEKEEPING BY MARILYNNE ROBINSON
Reviewed by Beverly Mantyh
Spring cleaning. Simplify, organize, and de-clutter. Create a refuge. Make a memory. What does your home say about you? Web sites, magazines, books and television shows devote themselves ad nauseam to the topic of housekeeping. It appears we never tire of the subject. The tasks are cyclical, never ending.
Marilynne Robinson explores housekeeping as an indicator of health and social connectedness. Her main characters hope for a “resurrection of the ordinary” in a chaotic world of loss and abandonment. They struggle to keep up appearances when appearances seem to have nothing to do with reality. The adolescent narrator’s observations are perceptive and unsophisticated.
“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, 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 setting for Robinson’s novel is deliberately vague. She emphasizes a lonely atmosphere sometime in the last century, somewhere in a small mountain town, next to a glacial lake in the Northwestern Rockies. Their not quite square house sits apart from the town, just out of reach of occasional flooding from the lake.
The cold, deep lake plays a central role in the losses of Ruth’s life. Beginning in her mother’s generation, the lake claims her grandfather when his train derails and is never recovered from the frozen lake. Ruth’s mother drops the girls off at their grandmother’s porch, and then commits suicide by driving into the lake.
All vestiges of a supervised, ordinary life become warped when the lake floods the first floor of their home. After an unplanned, unsupervised, camp-out at the lake isn’t even commented upon, Ruth’s sister Lucille attempts to reinstate normality herself, “we must improve ourselves.” But even Lucille finally abandons the floundering family for stability in the home of a kindly home economics teacher.
Ruth and her aunt Sylvie are left alone to cope the best they can with their damaged housekeeping skills. The pull of the depths of the lake and what it contains distracts them from their household and societal duties. Ruth is faced with the chasm between her own life and the “ordinary” lives of others. “Now truly we were cast out to wander, and there was an end to housekeeping.”
This brief synopsis does not do justice to Robinson’s beautiful novel. Critically acclaimed, Housekeeping received the P.E.N. Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award for best first novel. Robinson also wrote the Pulitzer Prize winning novel Gilead (2004). She teaches at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Discussion Questions:
- Robinson delves deeply into the concept of memory: “Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it. God himself was pulled into the vortex when we fell, or so the story goes…….Sylvie did not want to lose me. She did not want me to grow gigantic and multiple, so that I seemed to fill the whole house, and she did not wish me to turn subtle and miscible, so that I could pass through the membranes that separate dream and dream.” Does your experience concur with Ruth’s explanation of loss and memory? Do lost loved ones grow huge?
- Why do you suppose Robinson chose Ruth to narrate rather than Lucille or perhaps Sylvie? Which character did you find to be the most sympathetic?
- The different generations of women in Housekeeping seemed to have different motivations for “keeping house.” Think about the differences between your grandmother, your mother and yourself about housework. Perhaps you can even imagine your own daughter’s attitude toward keeping a home? Are the differences based more in a generational attitude, or do they reflect family or individual values more than those of society? Examine your own attitude toward housework. Does it represent nature, or nurture?
