Housekeeping

From the title, one might think that it is an entirely different book, where the house is a central part of the story. But for Robinson, the house is a place where no one stops, certainly not a place of security.

And so, before Lila and Gilead, another small town is discovered, other wandering women, other lonely girls, but above all, that peace, that poetry, is found, which obscures and suffocates even pain and loss.

It doesn't seem like a beginning at all, no less mature than the Gilead trilogy.

Perhaps this exploration of different places and characters is Robinson's way of delving deeper into the human condition, showing the various aspects of life and the emotions that come with it.

It makes the reader wonder what else lies ahead in her literary journey and how these seemingly disparate elements will come together to form a cohesive whole.

Overall, this excerpt offers a tantalizing glimpse into Robinson's world, leaving the reader eager to discover more.

Housekeeping, written by Marilynne Robinson and published in 1982, is a remarkable work.

The sheriff visits twice in the weeks that follow. He is a tall, fat man with his chin tucked in, hands folded beneath his belly, and all his weight on his heels. Dressed in a gray suit with pleated pants and a tight jacket, he stands at the front door and talks about the weather, his manner suggesting deep embarrassment. He regularly leads the Fourth of July parade, dressed in buckskins and boots, carrying an oversized flag.

Housekeeping was a finalist for the Pulitzer and made the Guardian's list of 100 greatest novels in English. I'm familiar with Robinson's work and consider Gilead one of my favorites.

In Housekeeping, three generations of women struggle in Fingerbone, Idaho. The only significant man, grandfather Edmund, dies early. The story is narrated by teenage Ruth, who and her sister Lucille are abandoned by their mother. They are cared for by various relatives and looked upon with suspicion by the townspeople.

Themes of abandonment and the desire to be loved are at the heart of the book. The girls, especially Ruth, latch onto anyone showing affection, fearing being sent to an orphanage. They are eventually cared for by aunt Sylvie, who becomes an outcast. Sylvie and Ruth develop a bond and get to know the sheriff well.

What's surprising is Robinson's gift for descriptive prose. In my opinion, few authors are at her level. I often forgot it was fiction. Her descriptions root the story in place. While reading, it triggered thoughts of other great novels like Stoner, The Outsiders, and East of Eden.

I rate it 4.5 stars. I took off half a star because the plot could be more intricate and the story is short, but I'm still awestruck.

Powerful, and powerfully sad. It's like a unique blend of Steinbeck, Denis Johnson, with just a hint of Munro.

There is an odd yet captivating tendency toward repetition of images and descriptions. This makes me suspect it might have been written in parts.

The ending is simply gorgeous, lingering in the mind long after the book is closed.

Interestingly, there is a strange inclination towards religious thought, despite the absence of real religion in the book. These are the only moments where my attention waned a bit.

It's a work of pure exposition, and the plot, as it stands, is essentially a meander. However, the prose is of such a high caliber that it truly doesn't matter.

I'll especially remember a scene on the lake at night. It encapsulates everything that was both lovable and disturbing about the leads, creating a lasting impression that will stay with me for a long time.

“It had always seemed to me that Sylvie and I were there together purely as a matter of accident—the wind blows a milkweed puff and two seeds do not fly.” This opening line immediately draws you in, making you curious about the relationship between Sylvie and the narrator. The story that follows is not an easy one. It delves into themes of abandonment, suicide, and sadness.

I initially liked the beginning. I could vividly see and feel the solid grandmother, and I even laughed at the funny aunts. However, as I got to the middle of the book, I somehow felt disconnected. I was detached from the voice, from Ruthie, and a little adrift from the story. It seemed to be dragging, and I found myself wishing it would be over.

But Marilyn Robinson has other plans. She makes you stay in that uncomfortable place, linger there. She allows the confusion and longings to seep inside you. And then, when you reach the ending, it all makes sense as a strange relief.

“It was the kind of loneliness that made clocks seem slow and loud and made voices sound like voices across water.” This quote perfectly captures the essence of the story. Sometimes, we have profound and moving experiences that are not necessarily enjoyable when we're going through them. But afterwards, sometimes forever after, we learn from them, appreciate them, and value them. Reading this book is that kind of experience. It makes you think, feel, and grow.

All the female characters are the protagonists of this novel: two little girls (later young women) who became orphans, their grandmother, two aunts, and the youngest maternal aunt.

Then there is the lake, which is almost a protagonist itself: "the presence of the lake is always felt, or that of its abysses."

The two young girls love the lake, even in the harsh winter when its vast sheet of ice becomes a track for them to skate on until darkness falls, "like a presence in a dream."

At home, however, the elderly aunts, who came specifically to take care of their nieces, are frightened by the severity of winter, with extremely high snow and dark days.

There is a turning point when the still young aunt Sylvie enters the scene to replace the tired ladies.

She appears "with a calmness that seemed to be made of kindness, reserve, and absolute modesty"; "she had (...) a brooch, a small bunch of lilies of the valley."

And Ruth, the narrator being the older of the two sisters, remembers: "we and the house were all for Sylvie," now ready to face adolescence and youth.

This is the first work of the great American writer Marilynne Robinson, who will assert herself definitively with the famous Gilead trilogy. But here already is the beginning!

Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them. You simply say, "Here are the perimeters of our attention. If you prowl around under the windows till the crickets go silent, we will pull the shades. If you wish us to suffer your envious curiosity, you must permit us not to notice it." Anyone with one solid human bond is that smug, and it is the smugness as much as the comfort and safety that lonely people covet and admire.

I am half in love with Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping: a novel. It's like in one of those children's ghost stories about a haunting departed in their stolen youth who tries to taste in vain the warmth again by convincing a living child that they no longer need or want what light they could still have. Blood in the mouth, it is imitation fear and I can't believe I won't want anything ever again.

Wait for me here. Mother Helen drives the borrowed car into the lake. There are answers to all of the what ifs you could come up with to say that she hadn't truly wanted to die. But she gave her money and her purse to those two men. She left her two daughters on the porch of the grandmother they didn't know they had. Memory answers the question that has never been asked again and again. Her daughter Ruthie forgets what Helen looked like. How do you describe a person you just know? Someone you have already forgotten?

If there is something that keeps me from Thelma and Louise-ing it with Aunt Sylvie and Ruthie over the bridge (and I want to. They could convince me, if they really wanted me) is that Ruthie explains that she was expecting. She did not need to explain it. I wish she hadn't. I felt like I was so close to understanding something and it was washed away with a reason that made sense and couldn't have been everything. They keep house. It is the name of the book. Helen, her sister Sylvie (it seems they had a third sister with them to sit silently by their mother's feet, to brush her hair. If she existed she was a ghost and I have forgotten her) they are close to something. I would describe it if you ever had the impulse to hoard something. Sylvie has tin cans stripped of their labels. Clean and collected, cluttering. It is close to Godliness. Something to do with your hands. Will something ill toward occur if you don't keep the faith? If the shadow appears in your mind it is that you don't want to tempt it to find out. You keep them.

She, Ruthie, is always expecting for her mother to come back. She feels the emptiness of expectation. If you have felt alone when you are surrounded by people. It is a loss. Ruthie is the kind of girl that explains her Aunt's wish to retain custody as not wanting to make her niece a memory. To displace yourself in this way is part of it. It's not only expectation. You don't disappear into another place in time with a number for your turn instead of a name. When did Ruthie let go and write her dear diaries in her head a half beat as it happened in this way. So she can comfortably forget Ruthie is there when she is there, talk to all of the people who are larger than their lives in her head. Ruthie will wait. Ruthie will wait and when was that Ruthie. Sylvie sees Helen in Ruthie, or maybe she sees herself because Ruthie sees it as dreaming on faces. Ruthie sees Helen in Sylvie, if she remembers Helen at all instead of just Sylvie. Sylvie stretched out on park benches and watching Eleanor Rigby in the bus station on the way to another bus station. As soon as you get used to the new dull throb it beats a slower rhythm, sweats colder. Tedious life changes scenery. School doesn't tick tock every day to let out to wait for next day. It is the summer and the sun goes down later, allowing you to sleep later. Nothing to shade in the days but more waiting. I believe all this, believe me. I had this stone falling feeling in my belly like you could wait forever to hear the sound drop. I know how Ruthie feels. I notice the sleek hair, the well put together outfits. I have watched groups of girls go home on report card day and just knew inside me that they were going inside someplace to be somebody for someone else. If I could change enough I could be normal too. Is the secret the secret world of the possessed. There is a space between the Ruthie who went to school to be invisible. Head down, don't go, Laura's feet are click clicking on the tile floors when she was late to school in The Glass Menagerie. I always think about what stories fictional characters could have had if they had allowed themselves to have it. Sylvie used to love reading but somehow she forgot how to do it. I hope that never happens to me. When did Ruthie become the person that watches people for something to happen without the will or a hope for what could happen. She doesn't have imaginary friends. She looks for losses compared to haves. They let her sister Lucille leave them to join the world of the normal. I was afraid that the book would be about normal versus weird. It was a feeling I know pretty well. When I was a kid I was yelled at to be more normal or I'd be taken away too. In Housekeeping it is all Sylvie's fault. Where is Ruthie? Lucille must have wanted her sister at her side when she cannot breathe in the I forgot to put boots on when it is subzero subhuman living conditions. Crunch, crunch you can't hear anyone walking away in the snow. Ruthie is underneath the water where their mother drowned, her reflection shines in the pool where Sylvie may have intended to jump in that day. There are no answers and no one is really asking. I don't even know what to do about the kind of loneliness that Ruthie has. How come she dreams all of this like dreams that end before you wake up and you can't remember any of it later.

Sylvie likes to tell stories about people she may or may have not met in those staring contest bus stations. One was about a lonely woman who married a peg legged man she didn't love. All of the children couldn't put her back together again. Maybe she visited her mother with the kids, maybe her mother didn't believe it was really her daughter. Maybe the husband didn't believe her and was never kind to them again. He would die soon anyway. Maybe the woman never had anyone. She told Sylvie she wasn't getting off on her stop. Sylvie had offered her a hamburger if they were going the same way. Have you ever rejected an offer on habit and bitterly regretted it because you were quite thirsty after all? I imagine the woman wanted that hamburger and company but lost the nerve when she sees Sylvie standing there. Sylvie's stories make me think of the poor orphans in A Little Princess who tell the story of the magical feast to pretend they aren't so hungry anymore if the feast was acknowledged right up front to be pretend with no hope of ever becoming real.

But it isn't. I have put my own hand on my head, I have asked myself how I am doing. I've been my "own best friend", laughed at my own pathetic jokes (and also had a great time. Being alone is the absolute best sometimes and sucks other times. The trick is not to think about it too much and there's no hope of that not happening. Pinfall gut with people inside). Sometimes talking to myself is enough, or something anyway, but sometimes it is killing me to do it so much. I feel the "soul" of Housekeeping: a novel knows that underbelly part that says you can be lonely to yourself this way. I was hoping that they were going to get it and I would be okay if she was okay. Ruthie is assumed dead and on the run from her life in the ashes of a burned house and a getaway. The half of the face that is smiling looks upside down to me. Lucille could reasonably be presumed to have at least tried to find someone to love. I don't feel that one was wrong or right, only that if she cannot find out if she's alive, has to chase shadows in her own backyard in a rebuilt house that may or may not house a new family then she was writing a novel about her life like one of those 18th century novels that starts with the heroes death. It is a fantasy graveyard in the woods that Sylvie brings Ruthie to, pockets loaded with marshmallow treats and you can trust me I am one of you. It'd be so much easier to given in. You're just like me anyway. Broken feet crushed under the weight of fallen houses and the shoes that are no place like home were probably stolen like Sylvie's missing boots. The children could have embraced her, conjoined orphans. I wonder what kind of solace it was. Her with them or them going home with her. Sylvie didn't leave her there alone to go on a rescue mission for phantoms. It's a beautiful scene that made me breathless. You would not get up and freeze to death in those woods.

I had an idea about Helen and Sylvie's mom. They follow her, their eyes watch her. They move with her like a song you hear in your head that is not happening. You could think along what the next words are going to be but no one is going to say anything. She did not teach them how to love her, only to watch unassumingly and clean up time like one of those Langoliers in the Stephen King short story (time is eaten by monsters, in short). They grow quiet inside. If they were plants their light would be darkness within and bent towards it. I wonder if loneliness was really their problem. I know that Helen, Sylvie and Ruthie want to move into someone else's gut well and drink, to not be alone in needing something. But there has to be something else to it than merely waiting, as Ruthie says. I'm a little bothered.

An ex boyfriend sent me an email a while after I'd dumped him about some stuff and a recommendation of this book being for me was in it. This was years ago and I hadn't intended to follow him up on it (I was curious after some gr reviews of Gilead, though). It's one of those lonely with another person things that is and comes up to go "Hey, but what about?" when you feel desperately lonely. It's not it, though. If you knew what was wrong with you that cannot feel close to someone who asks you a question and then gives their own answer before you've had a chance to breathe a word. Maybe you could be with that person, make the Lucille desperate effort to wear the same dress patterns that every other girl is wearing (maybe Lucille did feel her salvation in knowing to do what they did. If she instinctively knew what it was that she was supposed to be doing. I wouldn't ever know those things).

Sylvie and Ruthie are strangers to me in that they didn't hate themselves. It was more a consciousness of how they didn't fit. Ruthie could have ended up that way. When she describes the ends of her waitressing jobs it sent a shiver of recognition down my spine. The smile that burns too long and brighter than it ever should. The customers who would begin to count their change a little more closely. The pressure on your neck to breathe in time with everyone else, to step where you are supposed to. I felt in her the look away when you have been caught staring, or someone has been staring at you. She wasn't burned under the hot lights of you are a criminal, stop! stop that person they don't belong to the human race. I am envious of Ruthie too because she gets to hide behind the house. I feel this envy of shut-ins because they never have to face other people (then I could imagine new fears to replace those). But what I really want to know is how Ruthie got to be that way in the first place? When she had wanted to belong with someone (I'm not sure it is Lucille. It's the wrong kind of company that just is the wrong kind of company). There's something to it when asked to describe the people they live with no one knows how to do it. I have the feeling that there's probably something right in not trying to do it all the way, but not forgetting they are there. I'm a bit unsettled. It's nearly my kind of lonely and that made me feel... really lonely. I don't feel like writing this kind of review about loneliness and social anxiety again. I do it all the time. How do you explain you don't fit? Housekeeping: a novel did it perfectly when Ruthie refuses to help Lucille make her dress patterns to be normal. It feels like that. Someone offers you a way out and you can't take it. There's a satisfaction in not taking it. You can say you don't fit, that you were abandoned. You probably wouldn't fit what is a dress going to do? But you could have given of yourself to help someone else and you didn't do it. I wish there wasn't an answer provided because there isn't one.

When one looks from the darkness into the light, however, one sees all the difference between here and there, this and that. Perhaps all unsheltered people are angry in their hearts, and would like to break the roof, spine, and ribs, and smash the windows and flood the floor and spindle the curtains and bloat the couch.

"Appearance is just a trick of the nerves, and the apparition is a slightly less successful trick, a less perfect illusion."


Marilynne is a beautiful name. The fact that it would seem unpronounceable to me if it were assigned around here - or anyway in an area with an average annual temperature higher than - doesn't add or subtract anything from its position in my personal ranking (which is not in degrees Celsius or Fahrenheit anyway. Although, come to think of it, maybe I could consider the thing for the future).


"Domestic Cures" is a beautiful title. It is especially so when the book is finished.

Those who love the real names of reality should read it.

Marilynne, a name that holds a certain allure, yet its pronunciation might pose a challenge in some regions with specific temperature conditions. However, this doesn't affect its standing in my personal perception. It's interesting to note that while I don't rank names in terms of temperature scales like Celsius or Fahrenheit, perhaps in the future, I could explore such an unconventional way of categorizing. "Domestic Cures" is a title that catches the eye and becomes even more enchanting once the book is completed. It seems to be a must-read for those who have a penchant for the real and tangible names that represent our reality. It offers a unique perspective and might just be the kind of book that leaves a lasting impression.

Beautiful, luminous writing.

As a general rule, I'm not typically a huge fan of long descriptive passages. However, Robinson's remarkable ability to transport the reader into a scene and make them see it through her eyes is truly unsurpassed.

This is a captivating story of two orphaned sisters who are placed in the care of an aunt they have never met. Their aunt, Sylvie, has spent many years as a 'transient' on the freight trains of North America before arriving at the house of their late grandmother to look after them. The story is filled with tension as it explores the conflict between a conventional, orderly life that pulls one sister away and the alluring freedom of a transient lifestyle, even when it is temporarily rooted in a house. Aunt Sylvie defies the rules of society. Her unbound experience of the world,尽管 untidy and lived hand-to-mouth, is her natural state. She is a free spirit that refuses to be confined.

The author poses this thought-provoking question to her readers: Is it better to conform to society's rules and belong, even if it feels constricting, or to live as a free outcast? Robinson seems to suggest that the latter, for those brave enough, offers a more immediate, in-the-moment way of life and is, therefore, a more exquisitely alive existence. The writing in this book is truly superb.