Marilynne Robinson is such a great writer! Even though I am a big fan, I had never read this, her first novel. Well, now another book read off my shelves and a 5 star read.

This book seems to be about the power of family, and about identifying as a quirky outsider. Two sisters, whose life has been shaped by tragedy, are cared for by an aunt, whose history is as a vagrant, and whose lifestyle is in huge contrast to their small Idaho town. ( )

As others have said this is a well-written novel. Set in a small town called Fingerbone, the novel has a timelessness and isolation that suits it. Nothing appears to happen in the outside world, few outsiders arrive in Fingerbone. Ruth and Lucille are left by their mother with their grandmother in Fingerbone and she looks after them well enough for a while. Later their aunt Sylvie moves in. She is an unusual character, once a drifter and at first the children worry that she will leave. From being inseparable, the two girls grow up and diverge. Lucille begins to look outwards, while Ruth isolates herself even more. Descriptive and heady, this was a good read. ( )

Housekeeping feels like the first novel of someone who is more comfortably a writer of prose poetry or extremely short works. Any given paragraph or scene is quite lovely and well crafted, but taken together they make for a boring read that feels like somewhat of a chore. I had to stop at about half-way through. Too many other good things out there to read. ( )

A Popular Author’s First Book

Housekeeping, a book I read because I enjoyed Marilynne Robinson's subsequent novel Gilead, would make a great reading club or English class book. It's an odd story, beautifully written, covering the early teenage years of its narrator Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille. The girls have been deposited on their widowed grandmother's doorstep by their mother, who subsequently drives her car off a cliff into the same local lake that claimed their grandfather's life in a railroad accident. After their grandmother's death five years later, the girls spend a brief interlude with their great aunts before their mother's sister Sylvie comes to take over.

Sylvie could be politely termed a colorful character. She has little interest in housekeeping and even less in raising her nieces. The girls grow up in poverty and truancy, spending a great deal of time wandering around the local lake, which is haunted by both the unseen local residents and the scores of victims entombed within its waters. As Ruth's bond with Lucille wanes, her attachment to Sylvie grows, until she becomes a diminutive version of her eccentric aunt.

Housekeeping describes an older time in the nation's history, when people lived their lives freer of government intrusion—it would not take nearly as long today for the sheriff to intervene in such a dysfunctional family. While the story is well-told, it's difficult to find a character to root for and the ambivalent ending feels both appropriate and inevitable. ( )

precocity on the page

An apparently dated work - readers no longer being so credulous of the view-from-the-camera-lens perspective which produces intimations of seeing and knowing things which the narrator, frankly, has no way of apprehending.

Similar to Murnane's feeling upon reading the first lines of The Tin Drum, that something fishy is circulating when the narrator professes to be writing from a mental asylum. It is impossible to know the thoughts, let alone feelings of our narrator's grandfather; thoughts which are presented in the setting of such well-honed prose that the reader is apt to forget such intrusions. A train derailment, described as "a weasel slipping off a rock," is also impossible, given its being witnessed by no one, and only to be experienced as the violent sensation of being thrown into the ceiling by the ones inside. The description of the "slip" is only possible from the vantage point of a camera placed high on the hill to record the occasion.

Though the portrayal of men in the text is interesting worth investigating. As we say regarding disputations on matters of taste, that "objective criteria exist, but have yet to be discovered," we can say the same regarding that terminal functionality toward which all men in the narrative appear directed. Men as school principal and sheriff, though adequate for the roles, appear to be doing theirs jobs provisionally. Hobos as existing, though this is also not perceived as a final form. This function is whatever men are moving toward when they leave and we don't expect their return. This is altogether more interesting than women-writing-men-as-men-wrote-women [previously, in male writing, as functionaries of "housekeeping"] though that alone would have been enough.

"frequent murders" intentionally excluded

Someone who never goes to school and who never goes to church possessing a kind of polished academic speech and affinity for academic-biblical metaphor. Disciplined/structured metaphors of the lake, from someone who should know it more intimately and more equivocally, not a locus of rebirth/death with heavy emphasis on the biblical/eschatological sense, but as (briefly) a house, reflection, relationship to animals, active/passivity of a body frozen over and broken, cooling/chilling/warming/biting breeze, receptible of refuse/pollution which breathes all this back, pierced by struts of a bridge, giving the bridge up from itself, inversion of the town held by the land as the bedrock holds the lake, lake as a puddle on a rock, refracted light on submerged fingers such that it appears the "fingerbone" has been broken. Instead concluding with, likely not unintentional, re-presentation of Homer's, "Who has known his [her] own gendering?" And burdened, all the while, with an unfortunate felicity for written dialogue. ( )