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Housekeeping

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The meanings of these stories are complex and must be thoroughly analyzed before making rash judgments. She resembled our mother, and besides that, she seldom removed her coat, and every story she told had to do with a bus or a train station.

In an echo of Robinson’s own divided nature, the Stone sisters, inseparable in childhood, begin to grow apart. She was really prepared for someone to come and it wasn't expensive at all, but thats where things started to get weird. Ruth is the one to accept these odd habits of her aunt, but Lucille does not want to tolerate such behavior and, thus, begins to rebel. Here, early descriptions of Ruth, Lucille and Sylvie appear amongst notes for her dissertation on Part Two of Shakespeare’s Henry VI, hastily jotted phone numbers for child-care centers, and drafts of letters to friends or family that discuss everything from the impeachment process against Richard Nixon to the progress of her garden. The theme of isolation flows out of another central theme of this novel: the feeling of loss and how different people deal with it.

Lucille and me she tended with scrupulous care and little confidence, as if her offerings of dimes and chocolate-chip cookies might keep us, our spirits, here in her kitchen, though she knew they might not. She emptied several cupboards and left them open to air, and once she washed half the kitchen ceiling and a door. In spite of these changes, Ruth knows that the town of Fingerbone fears transience, and that she and Sylvie are “doomed. It is a fact of life that everyone will need to do housework, even if there are a million other things they would rather be doing.

All this, like a sprinkling of salt around our boundaries, a spell to protect ourselves against abandonment, separation, loss. One of the days, Lucille’s rebellion reaches its peak, and she moves to her Home Economics teacher (Miss Royce).

The collision of creative work and domestic life is something that feels close to my own experience of home, though the textures of my parent’s work were very different to the quieter pursuits of reading, writing and scholarship. The flood that invades the city adds up to this feeling of loneliness that both Ruth and Lucille are already experiencing. Ruth is, from the perch of adulthood, all-seeing and able to track the subtle but devastating shifts in love and loyalty between her younger self, Lucille, and Sylvie over the course of a couple potent months. Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson won’t cure loneliness, but it’s the perfect read in which to find solace amid these unusual circumstances. Ruthie narrates the story of how she and her younger sister Lucille are raised by a succession of relatives in the fictional town of Fingerbone, Idaho (some details are similar to Robinson's hometown, Sandpoint, Idaho, particularly the presence of a major rail bridge and direct rail links to Spokane and Montana).

I feared and suspected that Sylvie and I were of a kind, and waited for her to claim me, but she would not. After their grandmother’s death, the girls enter the care of their anxious spinster great-aunts Lily and Nona, and then at last their mother’s sister, Sylvie, comes to Fingerbone to take up housekeeping and look after them. My mother never drove one of her beat-up cars into the lake waters of her childhood, and nobody I loved ever slid off a railway bridge in a train car in the middle of the night. Robinson began working on the novel in the mid to late 1970s when she was establishing housekeeping herself, presumably in Seattle, Washington, where she was a student in the English PhD program. Nevertheless, the girls soon begin skipping school frequently to ice-skate along the lake’s surface, fish down at the lake’s shore, and explore the woods around it.Ruth is initially reluctant, but after realizing that Lucille is not coming back, she agrees to skip school so that Sylvie can take her to the lake as soon as possible. There’s little talk about sin or damnation in her writing, but a lot about forgiveness and tolerance and kindness. As I grow older, I notice both a fear and desire to relive aspects of my parent’s story, especially as I consider the possibility of motherhood myself. Abandoned by their suicidal mother at a young age, Ruth and Lucille are raised for several years by their grandmother Sylvia. Here, they are raised by their aunt Sylvie who is as intriguing as she beyond the reach of her nieces (and, indeed, the reader!

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