A Literary Life

Housekeeping (Marilynne Robinson)

(Howdy to the Book Trail, who suggested this book for its first online book club selection.)

My threshold for pure words for words sake is pretty high. I mean, I dig on David Foster Wallace. I’m down with Coover. And sheesh, I love a good Ayn Rand book, too. But Marilynne Robinson might be in an entirely different ballpark. She’s Foster without the biting wit and Coover without the post-modern time and perspective shifts. Instead, Robinson’s writing is dense, overly intellectual (honestly, who knows what “lucifactions” are?), claustrophobic, oddly structured grammatically, almost plotless, frustrating, meandering and… well, brilliant.

Though the words seemed to leak out of my ear as I took them through my eye, making me reread paragraphs two or even three times, it was obvious throughout that I was in a master’s hands (or a master’s hands were in my eyes?). The prose may be sluggish and dense, but it’s purposeful in what it doesn’t say, in what the characters don’t do. The main character, Ruthie, places herself and the few people in her life under a microscope, dissecting their every trait, every action or every stillness. Yet at the same time, she brings the most minor incident — a coil of hair kept by her grandmother, graham crackers her mother purchased, the way a woman brushes her hair — into a cosmic, philosophic perspective.

“If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation. I expected–an arrival, an explanation, an apology. There had never need one, a fact I could have accepted, were it not true that, just when I had got used to the limits and dimensions of one moment, I was expelled into the next and made to wonder again if any shapes hid in its shadows. That most moments were substantially the same did not detract at all from the possibility that the next moment might be utterly different. And so the ordinary demanded unblinking attention. Any tedious hour might be the last of its kind.”

Ruthie and her sister Lucille, you see, were dropped off by their mother at their grandmother’s house in the small, harsh and wet town of Fingerbone, where long ago their grandfather was killed when his train tumbled from the very high, very long train trestle over the town’s lake. The girls’ mother, after dropping them on the porch, soon follows her father’s fate in her car, driving her car purposefully over a cliff. The girls eventually wind up in the care of their aunt, Sylvie, a drifter by trade and by nature. (Again, plot is not the books’ strong suit, nor is plot summarization mine.)

This is world inhabited by women, and solely by women of two types: the isolated homebody whose neat, proper actions are the only signs of their identity and their love, and then the dreaming drifter, her head as full of cobwebs as the corners of her parlor, which she’d rather use for her growing tin can and newspaper collection than for guests.

True to the title, the book is about housekeeping, literally and also metaphorically. Some abhor cobwebs, others are thrilled at the way the sunlight sparkles, caught in the spider’s silky net. Some women are about casseroles, peach prom dresses, hair ties, wedding rings and other physical manifestations of life. They turn up the lantern to stave off the dark, not realizing they will see only themselves reflected in their windows, thereby sealing up the mysterious, dank and magical outside world. The latter group stands in the dark just to feel it permeate their skin, to feel themselves soak into it. They look in windows at the trapped souls, shaking their messy heads in wonder that those caged animals don’t realize all their material goods and social niceties mean nothing, vanishing like mist through the fingers, intangible. Thoughts the only commodity of value.
Just as Ruthie’s mother, the suicide, made more of an impact on her daughters’ lives than her presence would have, sometimes the lack of plot actually causes the most dramatic of realizations.

I think that if it’s possible for a reader to get into this thick and marshy style of Robinson’s, anyone who lives a bit more inside their head than in the real world is going to “get it.” Those introspective, pondering, impetuous, romantic and idealistic women who know what it is like to float around the edges of life, who often don’t understand the fervent importance of certain traditions or possessions, and who — most importantly — don’t see why that is such a bad place to be. Who see the freedom in that.

Granted, most of us who fit that description still enjoy a casserole now and then. And yes, hopefully we pick up a rag to dust the essentials every blue moon. But we understand the friction between the halves as well as the freedom of casting off all housekeeping for an afternoon pondering the dew in the cobwebs. We catalog all those poignant moments that “bulge like the belly of a lens,” showing us the underside of reality, which is more transparent and amorphous than most people dare to imagine.

Award-Winning, Book Trail, Fiction |