Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping is a strange, difficult and exceptional novel. I am generally for the idea that form is content, and I think this axiom applies to Housekeeping. Ruth, our narrator, is a young girl whose intimate proximity to loss shapes her entire world, be it the mysterious, self-effacing nature of the town of Fingerbone or the family members who disappear near the very same lake that is explicitly likened to the biblical flood.

Most of the novel is told in the imperative mode ("imagine this" / "say that") and as such, only exist insofar that the reader agrees, along with Ruth, to the act of creation, or resurrection, as the novel would prefer it. Ruth, a child whose life has been defined by death, can only comprehend her present through what is not - her act of resurrecting the dead through these imperatives, bespeak of a love that reveals itself only through monumental loss. Unlike her sister, Lucille, who'd rather stick with the rituals of daily life to fend off her sorrow, Ruth is inclined towards embracing death (she often dreams of being swallowed whole by the lake); understanding, maybe, that destruction is simply another act of creation. Death occasions Ruth (and us) to imagine her parents, an act of love that is infinite and hence, whole.

I read this within one day. Then, still mesmerized, I read it again.

What a haunting way to tell a story so much about the tragedy of modern life. The language flows lucidly from the very beginning, and the story unfolds in a way that is slow, but just right and just absolutely beautiful. The characters continue to live with me. I can still see Sylvie "with a quiet that seemed compounded of gentleness and stealth and self-effacement." We only get to know her in gradual stages, and this made the second reading more satisfying. I needed to see this story fresh again. Although Ruth is the narrator, she is also mysterious in her self-effacement and yet the overall narrative is Transcendental in its scope, echoing Ruth's transcendent view of the world, in its largeness. ( )

This book is narrated by Ruth and begins with a short family history, of her eccentric maternal grandfather whose tragic death completely marks the family, and her grandmother who in her own way tries to live with the sorrow and raise her children, and of the three sisters among them, Helen, Ruth's mother. After another tragedy, Ruth and her sister Lucille are raised by their grandmother, growing up semi-isolated from the rest of the small town of Fingerbone and drawn always to the town's lake that is the source of family tragedy. When Ruth's grandmother dies, and after a brief period with their grandfather's relatives, their aunt Sylvie arrives to be their guardian.

Sylvie is one of the most interesting and mysterious characters I have ever read. She's a rare kind of character in literature, a woman who Ruth describes as a transient, who finds pleasure in riding trains and traveling around with no signs of permanence or stability. The two sisters react differently, Lucille works to fight against Sylvie by cleaning and seeking a more ordinary life while Ruth is drawn to her and scared at first of this.

A Doris Lessing blurb on the back page of my copy informs me that "this is not a novel to be hurried through, for every sentence is a delight." A brief and accurate statement that perfectly describes this book.

After I was done reading a difficult but good book, I wanted to read something that flowed faster, and one that required less of me and I should have known better than to read Housekeeping with this in mind. As I tried to rush through the book, I was tripped by beautifully crafted sentences and fell right into the richness of the book, disentangling myself and obstinately rising again, I'd be caught and stumble again and again. Until in a way the book forced me to slow down and allow myself make a keener reading of the book. It is a tough read; a book that deals with death, loss, abandonment, family, loneliness and independence, a wonderful read. ( )

Housekeeping is one of the most lyrical and gorgeously written novels I've read. Forty years ago when the book first came out, I read it as a tale of a vagabond woman, or the virtues of wandering, but the tragedy and grief is stronger in my appreciation of the story now. Evocative of the Northern Idaho countryside and Lake Pend Oreille, the location is as much a character as are the orphaned sisters, Ruth and Lucille. Their Aunt Sylvie makes this a story of transience as much as about keeping a house or a soul in place. One of my top favorites. ( )

I've read two out of the four Gilead novels. The last one I read, Jack, I didn't like nearly as much as Gilead. So I thought I would try this earlier novel of Robinson's to see if it was her early writing that I liked. This book was more engaging than Jack was but still not up to the standards of Gilead.

The novel's main character is Ruth. She and her sister Lucille were brought to the small town of Fingerbone, on the edge of a largish lake, by their mother. She dropped them off at her mother's house, who wasn't home at the time, and then drove off. A few hours later she drove her car into the lake in what was probably suicide. The lake had also claimed the life of the girls' grandfather when the train on which he was crew went off the bridge across the lake with no survivors. The grandmother looked after the girls up until her death. Then two maiden great-aunts came to take over looking after them. They were completely unused to children and were consumed with nervousness. They contacted the girls' Aunt Sylvie who had been living a nomadic life around the western United States. When she finally turned up the great-aunts lost no time in fleeing the house and the children and the town. At first, Sylvie seemed like a much better choice but as the weeks and months went by, she proved that she had no aptitude for living in one place or looking after two young children. Ruth was quite taken with Sylvie but Lucille finally had enough and went to live with one of her teachers. Ruth and Sylvie kept living in the house but in no sense of the word did they "keep house". When Ruth started skipping school and spending more time with Sylvie, sometimes on the lake in a borrowed rowboat, it was obvious that the end of their living in Fingerbone was coming near. And so, one day, they hopped on a train and took off.

This was quite a sad book what with the child abandonment and failure to provide the necessities of life by all the adults in Ruth's life. Also, the men just seemed to have dropped out of existence which does happen but certainly impacts how children grow up.

I have to say that there were some wonderful passages in this book. Robinson is a fine writer, maybe even a gifted writer, but she will never be a favourite for me. ( )

I previously read Marilynne Robinson's four Gilead novels, and only now this Housekeeping, written 25 years earlier, and that may be the wrong order. I definitely recognized the very controlled, refined writing style; Robinson is a first-class craftswoman who writes heavily charged sentences in a misleadingly poetic upmake. And I also recognized the emphasis on sensorial introspection: just as in the Gilead novels, the main character (here Ruth Foster) constantly alternates between registering her own sensory experiences and reflecting on what that does to her, and on the things she struggles with. Here Robinson approaches what the 19th century naturalists and symbolists did, by focusing on the threat posed by the environment in which this story takes place: the remote, chilly village of Fingerbone (the name alone), on a large lake in Idaho, connected with the outside world by a railway bridge that runs over the water. The tone is set right from the start: Ruth tells how her grandfather died when a train derailed on the bridge, ended up in the lake and was never recovered (and neither the bodies of the passengers within). And less than 20 pages later we read how her own mother committed suicide by driving her car off a cliff into the lake. The 'gothic flavor' of this novel is also emphasized further on, including in an unparalleled nocturnal scene in which the house is half flooded; darkness and obscurity clearly are recurring themes in Robinson.
But the main body of this novel describes how Ruth, together with her sister Lucille, subsequently came under the care of her aunt Sylvie, a confused, chaotic and very dreamy character. Robinson writes quite emphatically: “it was the beginning of Sylvie's housekeeping”, and in doing so she immediately provides us with a key to reading this novel. After all, it is not only about the struggle to keep the house (literally), but also about keeping it 'in order', and by extension also one's own life. Looking back on it, you notice that all the characters in this novel struggle with this: getting a grip on their own lives, curbing the inherent chaos of life and steering it in the right direction, and what you have to give up and sacrifice in doing so, and whether such an orderly life is actually the right choice. And all that aggravated by the struggle with loss, grief, isolation and loneliness, especially as a woman or a girl.
In other words, through Ruth Foster's coming-of-age story, Robinson opens up a reflection on what this life is all about and whether it makes sense to control it. To be clear: she does not give simple, obvious answers, but above all - through Ruth - asks the right questions. And thus there is a link with the Gilead novels, which essentially deal with the same theme, but with a clear, more religious - read Calvinist - slant, in which the question of good and evil, damnation and grace are more central. I think that Robinson definitely shows even more mastery in some of those Gilead novels, both stylistically and substantively, but with this 'Housekeeping' she already showed that her novels are among the best of what has been written in recent decades, worldwide. ( )

This was upsetting on many levels. Stories about women who aren't mothers but do have children are the most devastating things on the face of the planet. I also can't help but think about Ada or Ardor re: Lucille, Lucette who wanted more and more and then is left/leaves. And of course, the red hair. When Ruth is left overnight outside in the dark will haunt me for the rest of my life. ( )

Finely written, poetic and in some ways very sad, though not without touches of humour and light. I enjoyed it, but perhaps not quite as much as some of Robinson's later books. ( )

Reading this book was a real chore. The writing seemed to be good, but it never took my mind anywhere. No plot to speak of. Characters that were just strange and unconnected. A very different, morbid, sad tale. Gilead was a much better read. It is amazing how different a reaction you can have to a writer's work from one book to another. ( )

I love Marilynne Robinson, but I did not love Housekeeping. It may have been the audiobook narrator, but I found it very difficult to connect with anything about the story or characters. The one hope I had - the romanticism of Sylvie and the home she shared with the girls - was dashed long before the end of the novel. If I didn’t love Gilead so much I’d likely avoid Robinson in the future. ( )

Nothing much happens, and yet everything of significance happens, in this classic. While I felt it dragged at times, there is no denying the exceptional writing (almost a master class) in this novel. If you're a writer, get this book. If you're a reader, get this book. ( )

I've heard great things about this book from people whose taste I respect, so I was surprised to find myself just not that into it. To be honest my opinion might have been tainted by the fact that I listened to the audiobook and really hated the reader, who instead of letting the prose speak for itself felt compelled to impose a weird intonation on it so that it sounded most of the time like she was reading step-by-step instructions instead of a novel. That prose was indeed lovely, but the story and characters didn't draw me in -- I never felt like I couldn't wait until I had time to continue reading. ( )

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. ( )

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. ( )

Marilynne Robinson's "Housekeeping" already has two-hundred reviews of LibraryThing, so I'm not sure that there's anything of substance that I can really add to the discussion. I'll just say that text is freighted with heavy themes ranging from the artistic to the Biblical to the social but that reading it feels as easy and natural as breathing. Reading this one is like watching someone hit an impossibly long series of mind-bendingly complex half-court shots without breaking a sweat, seemingly barely aware that there's a basketball hoop somewhere out there in the distance. I often found myself so impressed by the prose that I had to leaf back to see what, exactly, I'd missed in terms of content. There was always something, so I'll probably have to reread this one soon.

I'm docking this half a star because despite the fact that I'm awed by Ms. Robinson's abilities as a writer, there's a tinge of a certain fantastical old-timiness here that bothers me. The book begins with the shocking and somewhat mysterious wreck of a passenger train. That's fine, but it signals a sort of nostalgic tone that continues throughout the text. Whatever Robinson is, she doesn't care to be much of a realist, and "Housekeeping" sometimes seems like a concerted effort to describe a beautiful but now almost entirely vanished version of American life. It's not for nothing that it's difficult to say exactly which decade of the twentieth century this novel is set in: I couldn't find a reference to single historical event that happened in the larger world that might offer a definitive clue. The Fingerbone, Washington that our narrator describes is a place so isolated that it seems not just geographically remote but also a bit adrift in time, too, the sort of place where the past lingers for as long as circumstances let it. For reasons specific to my own life experience, this isn't the sort of artistic preoccupation that draws me in, and I feel that, in the hands of an even marginally less gifted writer, the whole novel could have slid into solidly unspectacular whimsy. The author's talent is so prodigious that it never does, but there's still a bit of it hanging about, which keeps me from giving it the five stars its prose earns from its first page onwards. Recommended to everyone, but most of all to aspiring writers. It's hard not to think that Marilynne Robinson, who I'd somehow never read until now, set a new bar for good prose here, and one that everyone that follows will find hard to clear. In short, this one's so good that it's almost intimidating. ( )

"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."

Housekeeping is the simple story of sisters Ruthie and Lucille and their atypical upbringing in a small lakeside Idaho town. Orphaned by their mother's suicide the sisters are raised by a succession of maternal relatives (grandmother, great aunts). The final guardian is their strange aunt Sylvie who has spent some years as a drifter and arrives back at her childhood home less than prepared to deal with two young ladies.

Narrated by Ruth as she recollects her youth with her sister and aunt in the remote town, the novel describes familiar scenes from childhood -- adventuring and exploring, feeling awkward and lonely, the openness of children to accept people and the painful, sometimes excruciating moments of learning one might be different. Robinson explores themes of loss, impermanence, and sisterhood through the eyes of Ruthie, Lucille, and Sylvie.

I say it's a simple story, and it is, but the novel is far from plain. The writing is extraordinary. There are paragraphs and pages that I had to re-read because they were so exquisite, delicate, layered. I absolutely luxuriated in the prose and I didn't want the story to end. When I turned the last page my heart hurt a little bit for it being over. I finished reading this two days ago and I still haven't fully let it go. It's a captivating novel which will stay with me and I'm sure I'll revisit it. Needless to say I highly recommend it. ( )

I couldn't get through this novel. Robinson has a nice writing style, but the story and characters just weren't very compelling. I abandoned it after about 40 pages. I guess the story would have been intriguing enough if the characters had been fleshed out more. I hope Gilead is better. ( )

Bleak. Beautiful writing, but the writing felt over-complex at times.

A very low-key exploration of a family that faces abandonment issues and that struggles with different definitions of what it means to be a family. I admit to nodding out throughout. I suppose beautiful prose offsets some of the boredom... ( )

This book is Very Literary, with beautiful writing and sparse plot. Themes of lonliness, isolation, family ties, and a strong sense of place. I don't know if I necessarily enjoyed the reading, but could see the excellence of Robinson's craft. ( )

Housekeeping enchants me, by which I mean it takes me out of the ordinary into a world told in elevated, poetic prose about situations that I might otherwise not believe if they weren't done so well. It's about family, loss, wandering, wondering, trying to fit in, trying to break free, and a dozen other themes and topics.

Though I don't understand much of what the narrator dreams about and ponders, I still take it all in without wondering, because the language is so strong and overcomes me. Same with the stories in Housekeeping; I don't ask about motivations or reasons, but let the plot carry me along.

(This review is from my Dec 2022 rereading. I can't say I remember much of my first read eleven years ago.) ( )

Not sure what it all meant, but the writing was beautiful. Thousands of beautiful sentences. A dreamy, sad story. ( )