As everyone has noted, the writing in this work is exquisite and detailed. However, a lot of the rest of what has been written in the more recent reviews I find rather troubling and, frankly, misleading. Recommended for 'women who like descriptive writing'? That's just gross. This novel was given to me by a dude, and further recommended by a (male) writer I know - a guy who counts Earnest Hemingway among his favorite writers - as one of the best novels of the 20th century. This is not, as has been implied, some kind of lady-book.

Marilynne Robinson's 'Housekeeping', like all great literature, is a revelation. It's a revelation of loneliness in particular, and of transience (two subjects often, if stupidly, associated with male psyches and literary tastes). In my opinion, it resonates less as a girl-comes-of-age story or as a tale of sisterly bonds than it does as just the story of a person trying to make it in a family trying to make it in a town trying to make it in this world. It's 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" - the problem of why we should and shouldn't go on living. Robinson, of course, is a novelist, not a philosopher, and she's not in the business of telling us why we should or shouldn't go on, but of showing us 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 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, diminished 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 difficulties sometimes seemed pleasant and ordinary, would value itself, 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'

The mountains that stood up behind it were covered with snow and hidden in the white sky. The lake was sealed and hidden too. 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. There was a spacious silence that seemed to ring like glass.

Because Marilynne Robinson, a fellow at the prestigious Iowa Workshop, embodies all the attributes of an American aesthetic that has clearly made its mark since the 1980s. Her introspective, atmospheric, and crisp writing style, which many have tried to emulate, is at its strongest in her hands. Housekeeping is not a light read. Her debut novel takes us to the town of Fingerbone, which, like its name, exists at the very barren periphery of the northwestern plains. Smothered by mountains and sealed within its own harshness, the glacial town is oppressive. The climate is haunting in its capacity for grief. It immediately reminds me of Alice Munro's equally unforgiven and serene Ontario wilderness. The contrast between the naturally gothic and the religious, small-town societies serves as points of subconscious entry for both Munro and Robinson. Curiously, both writers have often been labeled with "domestic fiction" or, worse, "women's writing." But this crude description fails to grasp the most basic concepts of their fiction. The plot of Housekeeping, as the title suggests, centers around a domestic premise. But this tension is never muted. It is merely a prop for Robinson's exploration into the struggles of humanity against an unrelenting environment.

There are two metaphors at play in Housekeeping. There is the melancholy life of Fingerbone, "chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere," which slowly eats away at the abandoned sisters of Ruth and Lucille. However, with each inept and increasingly anthropophobic relation who housekeeps for the children, they all succumb or are repelled by the Asophdel lure of Fingerbone's ominous lake and blanketing ice sheets eventually. It is within the various geographies of Housekeeping where the novel triumphs at conveying the mood of transience. All things are frozen and lonely at the beginning, but Robinson shows that time is impermanent when the lake thaws, the rains flood the town, and the once still nature, at a distance, becomes menacingly close. The cold, the wind, the darkness all approach like wolves, and more dramatically, such darkness starts to make house in the minds of the children under the influence of their ethereal aunt, Sylvie.

Robinson's domestic dread is also a fundamental fear of the unknown and untamed. The nature of this sublime focuses on a particularly American type of existence: natural geography lacking in human history. The flood destroys the town's library, "creating vast gaps in the Dewey decimal systems." So the epistemological search for transcendence, Robinson argues, must take place in the wilderness. Except, unlike Thoreau's Walden, Ruth and Lucille are not merely looking to be spiritually saved but are looking to understand the turbulence of their existence and the transient, resurgent nature of their childhood that has passed them by so far. Both physical and metaphysical floods drown the town. Through water, Robinson explores all the possibilities of the intersection between the intangibility of light with darkness, the shallow in the deep. Housekeeping rests primarily on Robinson's potent descriptions of things that are barely perceptible but are given great importance. The cracked thawing of a river signals tremendous change, while the life that squirms under the ice affects the characters too. And even after the flood, the water lingers in the fabric of the house as a constant reminder of wetness. The novel's transition between states of nature - water, ice, air - becomes the parallel to the various characters and their own fragile natures. Slyvie, for example, always on the edge of leaving, flows from town to town like water. And this metaphorical contrast between the random fluid movements of the water and the dangers of stasis and entrapment, which Housekeeping channels into the peripheral themes of gender roles and religious conservatism, ultimately warns of the futility of not fitting into a society as judgmental and alien as Fingerbone.

Majestically slow, Robinson's novel is a short but charged meditation of great depth. The reading experience is like being submerged under cloudy water or trapped within a bell-jar filled with smoke or fog - detached but obfuscating like a dream. The novel's focus is always on the writing, and Robinson's writing manages to balance portentousness and sentimental theatricality. Her writing is uniquely rhythmic and steady, patterned often with peculiar moments of repetition, like circular rings on the ice that she carves out with great skill of language and poetry. Housekeeping is a wonderful evocation of the nature of being, of the relation between domesticity - in all its possible forms within a cloistered society - and the free spirit. Far from being a writer's writer, Robinson has created a mood piece that is illuminating in its kindling like glow but equally terrible in its journey to peer into the undimmed depths of loss, for which the novel takes on a universal position.