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HOUSEKEEPING by Marilynne Robinson
Some books have seasonal appeal - you know, the kind that seem appropriate to drag out when the weather turns colder, the leaves begin to change color. One of my favorite novels - Housekeeping - is that book. It's a hauntingly sweet story about women, about motherhood, about friendship, about the ties between women, and how strong and fragile those ties are.
Some books have female appeal - you know, the kind that strike a chord in women, that capture the complexity and confusion in us, that state with no exaggeration the tragedy of expectation related to who we are as daughters, sisters, wives, mothers, women. Housekeeping is that book.
The novel is steeped in melancholia and full of the nuances of life that are familiar yet unpleasant. Marilynne Robinson holds close to her novel's heart the notion of sadness and loneliness as beautiful; the book reflects her insight, her intuition, even, with its solitary quality. Each sentence is its own story. The novel, only 200-some pages, is weighty. Housekeepingshould be read slowly and carefully.
The title is not what it seems. The novel, published in 1980, is not an ode to domestic order and tranquility. Shiftlessness and introspection supplant the need for physical organization in the domestic realm. The women in the novel are not anchored to their home, nor are they anchored, firmly, to each other.
Ruth, the daughter of Helen and the granddaughter of Sylvia, is the novel's narrator. Her sister is Lucille. Her aunt, her mother's sister, is Sylvie. Ruth is a school-grade older than Lucille but seems unwilling to grow up - in the sense that at some point, she will seize with graciousness and a booming sense of responsibility the reins of older sister/role model. Ruth remains somewhat ageless throughout the novel. We know her as older, younger, the sister of, the daughter of, but most clearly (which is to say, unclearly) as an awkward and inward adolescent girl.
There is the comforting sense that growing up does not happen according to society's plans. The novel is quietly feminist; Robinson does not spur her readers into a frenzied rebellion against motherhood, but rather refutes, in subtle ways, its conventions.
Men are conspicuously absent in the novel. In the beginning, we learn that Ruth's grandfather, Edmund, "escaped this world years before I entered it." Ruth's father is but a name - his absence unaccounted for, his face nondescript, pieced together only by what others have described.
Sylvie's husband, "someone named Fisher," is regarded only briefly again in the novel. Lucille even suspects that her husband doesn't exist, and accuses Sylvie of such. Marriage seems to be something through which the women in the novel slip, unnoticed, and undaunted by its end. Their longing - that of the women - exists long after and far outside the safety of the institution.
Ruth's grandmother's fate carried the weight that her daughters would bear with greater ease: "When she had been married a little while, she concluded that love was half a longing of a kind that possession did nothing to mitigate."
Ruth and Lucille, who lived in Seattle with their mother, are delivered to a small Midwestern town called Fingerbone, where their mother rather casually ends her life by driving her car off a cliff. The grandmother, whose house is where they were deposited pre-suicide, becomes their caretaker until she dies; Sylvia's sisters-in-law, Lily and Nona, who "enjoyed nothing except habit and familiarity, the precise replication of one day in the next," are enlisted to help raise the girls but eventually bail because of health reasons (read: fear of adolescence).
Enter Sylvie.
Close to their mother's age at 35, and the closest thing to a mother the girls have ever had, Sylvie arrives on page 44, at which point the novel fully commits to pulling back the layers of structure and revealing something less distinct in shape and texture.
Sylvie, coming by train from Billings, Mont., dutifully plays for the elder women the part in appearance and demeanor of a woman fit to raise two girls, only to eschew any kind of convention once the house is as much her own as she's willing to accept. General disregard for orderliness ensues. Darkness is preferred to light, and in one illuminating moment, it becomes apparent that what is unpleasant to look at in the light is borne of certain unfounded ideas about playing house.
"We saw that we ate from plates that came in detergent boxes, and we drank from jelly glasses. ... Lucille had startled us all, flooding the room so suddenly with light, exposing heaps of pots and dishes, the two cupboard doors which had come unhinged and were propped against the boxes of china. ... Most dispiriting, perhaps, was the curtain on Lucille's side of the table, which had been half consumed by fire once when a birthday cake had been set too close to it. Sylvie had beaten out the flames with a back issue of Good Housekeeping, but she had never replaced the curtain."
Sylvie's lack of care in keeping up with the Joneses is deliberate on her part; she is hardly bothered by unkempt environs. Debris from the outdoors is welcome to float about freely in the house, and furniture, not to Sylvie's liking, finds itself reclining comfortably on the front lawn. Tin cans and newspapers accumulate like others collect pretty knickknacks. Squirrels, birds and mice eventually co-habitate with Sylvie, Ruth and Lucille.
"Sylvie in a house was more or less like a mermaid in a ship's cabin. She preferred it sunk in the very element it was meant to exclude."
The girls operate with grand latitude around her and under her care; they cease to attend school for long periods of time and instead wander around the lake. Sylvie, never irate with them for skipping out, writes notes excusing their absence due to "the discomforts of female adolescence." The girls become their own keepers, and while Ruth finds the aimless quality of such an existence somewhat enjoyable, Lucille is edgy with dissatisfaction; she wants a mother. Ruth finds herself increasingly attached to Sylvie's obvious detachment, but Lucille's loyalties are eagerly shifting to "the other world," as Ruth calls it. Lucille is desperate to naturalize herself into the world of proper clothes, hair and shoes, and above all, a dominant sense of order. The fact that Sylvie lived, in their house, like a transient, "offended Lucille's sense of propriety." Without question, Ruth acknowledges that her Aunt Sylvie is unstable. But this does not offend the girl, as she, too, is like Sylvie. A wanderer, not firmly planted in a role, an outfit, a house, a lifestyle with any rules or parameters.
And so the wanderers stick together, and the outcast, in this case, Lucille, leaves home to stay elsewhere, in a more stable environment. Ruth and Sylvie let the outside inside, and the house becomes less a safehaven and more an excuse to leave it behind. Ruth, with Sylvie's silent blessing, shirks that which she felt as only mild pressure to conform and integrate.
"When did I become so unlike other people? Either it was when I followed Sylvie across the bridge, and the lake claimed us, or it was when my mother left me waiting for her, and established in me the habit of waiting and expectation which makes any present moment most significant for what it does not contain. Or it was at my conception."
Housekeeping is a painfully pleasant journey, its end full of warmth and wonder and all that is unsettling.
Steeped in our current world of convenience and corporate culture and commercialism, this novel is necessary relief, Walden for the restless woman. The joys and fears of childhood never really leave us, we leave them for something more grownup and abhorrent. Adulthood - womanhood - improperly executed becomes something wicked when we become too tired to crawl inside the fears and look around.
Years after I read this novel, for the first time, I was given a copy of a book of poetry to read. The poetry, written by my friend's mother, opened with a quote from this novel. I never met her, but I felt comfort in knowing her writing - and in knowing that this novel had affected her. She understood, in her poetry, the constraints, the disappointments and the sentimental side effects, coming up a generation earlier than I, of being a mother, a sister, a wife, a woman. And the ways that all of this forces us, sometimes violently, to slip into our own subtext of reality, a bit more comfortable.
Housekeeping makes you feel clean, like autumn, brisk like the wind, refreshed like the silence of leaves drifting from their branches and into the earth.