Housekeeping: A Novel

Despite the beautiful prose and dark subject matter, I did not enjoy the experience of reading Housekeeping. I struggle to get into rural settings in general sometimes. I have, however, found myself thinking about it and the female community it presents a lot afterwards. It has a kind if haunting effect.

There's no way I could improve upon any other review of this book or properly put into words how utterly beautiful it was, while at the same time just evoking every visceral fear -- of losing people, losing your way, losing yourself, losing your mind -- or are they visceral hopes and dreams? -- to be free of all that society forces upon us and expects of us.
We are first introduced to the lonely, dank town of Fingerbone and this lonely family through the grandfather and his horrific death in a train crash where the train went off the tracks and into the river. The river then becomes another central character in the story and the source of this family's sadness, and hope.
Lucille and Ruthie weren't born in Fingerbone. Their mother had escaped for a while, only to bring them back as young girls, where they are raised for a time by their grandmother, then their two great aunts, who are baffled and put out by this unexpected responsibility. Then they locate Sylvie, the girls' long-lost aunt, and summon her back to Fingerbone to take over looking after the girls and the family home. Sylvie, who has been living a transient life, doesn't seem to know, or care, what to do with the house or the girls, and it sets them all on their fateful paths for very different futures.

I had this book on my shelf for a very long time. I don't know why I put off reading it for so long. What a treasure! Beautifully desolate. (Or desolately beautiful?)

349 pages A modern classic, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, the eccentric and remote sister of their dead mother. The family house is in the small town of Fingerbone on a glacial lake in the Far West, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town "chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere." Ruth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transcience.