'Housekeeping' still breaks literary ground
Celebrating its 30th year of publication this month, Marilynne Robinson's "Housekeeping" remains a respected novel whose prose styl influenced by 19th century transcendentalists is a rarity among 20th century texts.
Set in fictional Fingerbone, Idaho, "Housekeeping" tells the story of Lucille and her older sister, Ruth (the narrator of the novel), who grow up in a home of inconsistent and haphazard parenting. After their mother drives off a cliff into a lake next to their home (the same lake in which their grandfather perished in a train wreck years before), their grandmother passes away and their two great-aunts desert them, Lucille and Ruth are put under the surveillance of their eccentric aunt, Sylvie. "Housekeeping" humorously, touchingly and beautifully portrays survival, loss, Lucille and Ruth's turbulent path toward adulthood and the struggle to come to terms with transience in life.
The most remarkable thing about "Housekeeping" is its prose, the slow beauty of which might not be appreciated by the impatient reader. Although certainly accessible to a reader of any level, the beauty of "Housekeeping" lies not in just its story, but rather its mode of storytelling, paying the closest detail to things which in passing might seem irrelevant or minute. In the larger scheme, "Housekeeping" represents the task of keeping one's home intact (or as intact as possible), but more saliently, the task of keeping one's spiritual home intact, regardless of the malaise of the physical world. "Housekeeping" is a treasure of a novel, and all readers willing to appreciate the unconventional power of the remote, ordinary world to illuminate the universal struggle to understand tragedy should give its beauty.
Rating: 5 out of 5