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Housekeeping Paperback – 1 July 2010

by Marilynne Robinson (Author)

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A modern classic, 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, their eccentric and remote aunt. The family house is in the small Far West town of Fingerbone set on a glacial lake, 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 transience.

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"So precise, so distilled, so beautiful that one doesn't want to miss any pleasure it might yield." --Le Anne Schreiber, The New York Times Book Review

"Here's a first novel that sounds as if the author has been treasuring it up all her life...You can feel in the book a gathering voluptuous release of confidence, a delighted surprise at the unexpected capacities of language, a close, careful fondness for people that we thought only saints felt." --Anatole Broyard, The New York Times

"I found myself reading slowly, than more slowly--this is not a novel to be hurried through, for every sentence is a delight." --Doris Lessing

About the Author

MARILYNNE ROBINSON is the author of the novel Gilead and two books of nonfiction, Mother Country and The Death of Adam. She teaches at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ St Martin's Press
Publication date ‏ : ‎ 1 July 2010
Edition ‏ : ‎ First Edition
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Print length ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0312424094
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0312424091
Item weight ‏ : ‎ 204 g
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 14.07 x 1.5 x 21.06 cm

Best Sellers Rank: 725,559 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 2,316 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
- 2,832 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- 5,273 in U.S. Literature

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3,670 ratings

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Marilynne Robinson

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Marilynne Robinson is the author of the bestselling novels "Lila," "Home" (winner of the Orange Prize), "Gilead" (winner of the Pulitzer Prize), and "Housekeeping" (winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award).

She has also written four books of nonfiction, "When I Was a Child I Read Books," "Absence of Mind," "Mother Country" and "The Death of Adam." She teaches at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

She has been given honorary degrees from Brown University, the University of the South, Holy Cross, Notre Dame, Amherst, Skidmore, and Oxford University. She was also elected a fellow of Mansfield College, Oxford University.

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vivian garner
If you like her other books, you will like this one.
Reviewed in Australia on 15 December 2022
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Marilyn Robinson is always thought provoking and her characters are portrayed more through their thoughts than their actions. If you like a slow moving, dense, deeply analytical story, this is for you. If you want fast paced action and lots of plot twists, maybe not. I love it.

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tabbycat
I enjoyed other books by this author so expected to enjoy ...
Reviewed in Australia on 2 June 2016
Format: KindleVerified Purchase
I enjoyed other books by this author so expected to enjoy this one. Unfortunately I am finding it heavy going. I have not finished it but have put it aside for a later date.

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sally tarbox
Magical prose
Reviewed in Australia on 15 August 2018
Format: Kindle
An utterly compelling read, beautifully written: I want to say 'poetic', but I tend to abandon books of that description, and I loved this - so let's just say gorgeous prose.
Narrator Ruthie describes life on the edge of a lake in Idaho. After a city upbringing with her mother, she and sister Lucille are dropped off with their grandma. Ultimately they find themselves cared for by unstable aunt Sylvie; the watery environs are a constant theme (floods; strange boat trips; thoughts of the two family members who lost their lives to the lake.) Meanwhile the dysfunctional family are at odds with society as Sylvie turns grandma's home into a hoarder's paradise and the girls play truant by the lake. Ultimately the exclusive friendship of the two erodes as Lucille seeks a conventional teenage life elsewhere, while Ruthie allies herself with Sylvie...
It' a weird read; I read and enjoyed Robinson's 'Home' but this is a much more unusual and dreamy work.
I can't imagine being able to write like this- it's fabulous!

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Client d'Amazon
l'histoire résumé du livre
Reviewed in France on 25 September 2018
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pour mon cours de littérature anglaise

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BOB
The wonders of transients, transience, truancy and trains
Reviewed in the United States on 25 September 2016
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
The disaster has become a folkloric tale in the Pacific Northwest town of Fingerbone, as momentous in its history as the sinking of the Titanic was to the larger world stage. It is much more personal to Ruthie and Lucille, two orphans, their grandmother, whose husband was on the train that plunged off the railroad bridge into the icy depths of the lake, their mother Helen and their aunt Sylvie.

The family tale of the grandfather, who had grown up in the East and from childhood became obsessed with mountains and kept moving west until he found them, has cast a shadow over his descendants. Ruthie and Lucille’s mother Helen drove them back to Fingerbone from Seattle, deposited them with their grandmother, then drove off a cliff to her own cold, permanent sleep. Grandmother died, two great aunts came to live with the girls, then retired from the obligation once they had successfully lured the girls’ Aunt Sylvie back to the family home to look after the girls.

Marilynne Robinson appeared on the literary stage in 1980 with her novel ‘Housekeeping’, in my view the most impressive debut since Walker Percy’s ‘The Moviegoer’, then disappeared into academia and essay collections for over 20 years until a trilogy of novels, ‘Gilead’, ‘Home’ and Lila’ brought her back into the public consciousness.

The novel is a first person narrative from Ruthie, the older sister, from the vantage point of a few years after the concluding events of this novel. Her introversion and solitary nature seem to have cultivated a vision akin to Emerson, Thoreau and Melville, all of whom are recalled by such a breadth of poetic vision and transcendental wonder.

The grandfather got a job with the railroad and rose up to a supervisory capacity, eventually becoming the stationmaster. On a moonless night, the Fireball was halfway across the bridge “when the engine nosed over toward the lake and then the rest of the train slid after it into the water like a weasel sliding off a rock.”

The time is unspecified but could be anywhere from the 1940’s to the 1950’s. Ruthie and Lucille are solitary orphans, whose primary social contact is each other. Knowing that they were abandoned by an absent father and a suicidal mother, they are sensitized to any upheaval or departure that resembles yet another in a series of abandonments. Sylvie is still married, presumably separated from her husband for some time and has been a transient for the last few years. The girls absorb that information fairly quickly and therefore are alarmed whenever they wake up and she’s gone. Sometimes she merely sleeps outside. Ruthie is ever hopeful: “I was reassured by her sleeping on the lawn, and now and then in the car. It seemed to me that if she could remain transient here, she would not have to leave.”

What becomes the new normal to Ruthie is extremely disturbing to Lucille. When Lucille is absent for a week from school, Sylvie writes an absurd excuse giving the game away immediately. Lucille throws the letter away and the girls simply don’t return to school for the rest of the year. They spy Sylvie wandering by the lake, sometimes climbing up on the fatal bridge and would not be surprised if Sylvie decided to follow the example of her sister and father. They see her sleeping on a bench in the train station with a newspaper over her face. When she discovers that the girls have not been attending school, she refrains from giving them the expected scolding, an occurrence that leaves both girls feeling especially adrift. They spend days out in the woods. As Ruthie says, “I went to the woods for the woods’ own sake, while, increasingly, Lucille seemed to be enduring a banishment there.” A wedge begins to separate the girls as Lucille seeks the company of other girls and eventually goes her own way until finally moving in with a childless teacher. This strengthens the bond between Sylvie and Ruthie and Ruthie becomes reconciled to Sylvie’s lifestyle and begins to adopt it for herself.

Throughout the novel, the water and the train both exert an irresistible magnetic pull. The girls see the divergent paths of following each illustrated in the fates of their mother and their aunt. Lucille exempts herself from making either choice by leaving the home altogether.

Meanwhile, Ruthie learns to appreciate simple beauty from her association with Sylvie. When home they often follow Sylvie’s habit of sitting in the dark, “enjoying the evening”:
‘She seemed to dislike the disequilibrium of counterpoising a roomful of light against a worldful of darkness. Sylvie in a house was more or less like a mermaid in a ship’s cabin.”

Ruthie succumbs to Sylvie’s persuasion to get out in a boat on the lake and see the sun come up. Later she agrees to a search for a ruined cabin in the woods where a family once dwelled that is so secluded that the sun doesn’t reach enough of it to thaw it out for spring.

The novel is sprinkled on almost every page with passages of beauty, freshness and wisdom. Becoming reconciled to solitude, Ruthie muses:
‘Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them. You simply say, “Here are the perimeters of our attention. If you prowl around under the windows till the crickets go silent, we will pull the shades. If you wish us to suffer your envious curiosity, you must permit us not to notice it.” Anyone with one solid human bond is that smug, and it is the smugness as much as the comfort and safety that lonely people covet and admire.”

Robinson/Ruthie even conjures a unique fresh approach to the Biblical/Christian myth:
‘Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it. God Himself was pulled after us into the vortex we made when we fell, or so the story goes. And while He was on earth He mended families. He gave Lazarus back to his mother, and to the centurion he gave his daughter again…Being man He felt the pull of death, and being God He must have wondered more than we do what it would be like.”

In view of an inevitable separation and further splintering of family, Sylvie and Ruthie abandon their housekeeping and, like the misfit Huck Finn, ‘light out for the territory’. Although Robinson has no overt agenda, this is a feminist novel. The men in the family have departed, leaving only women and the women that can’t or won’t conform to the expectations of their society live on its fringes like Sylvie and Ruthie. Has Sylvie gone mad or simply achieved spiritual enlightenment? It hardly matters in view of the fact that she sees the novelty and beauty of the world, even in mundane pleasures such as removing the wrapping from discarded cans, rinsing them and setting them up in a pyramid on the kitchen table, stacks of newspapers “for insulation”, or carrying crackers in her pockets in case she runs into one of those children from the abandoned cabin. Abandoned by community and family, these women have created their own.
It is difficult for me to conceive that Robinson will ever surpass ‘Housekeeping’ for lyrical beauty, originality and breadth of perceptual vision. Each sentence is crafted with a precision and care that Flaubert would have admired. Few novels have so seamlessly woven the buoyancy of joy and the darkness of despair into such a profound meditation on the delicate and transitory nature of Beauty.

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Cliente Amazon
Deeply empathetic masterpiece
Reviewed in Spain on 2 March 2017
Format: KindleVerified Purchase
Incredibly beautiful prose on the misfits in life. You really feel for the characters, even if you don't identify with them, you can understand them. This book is guaranteed to stay with you.

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Rhys
Mesmerizing!
Reviewed in Germany on 25 June 2016
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This is not a realist novel. It is a fantastic novel about female bonding - mothers and daughters, sisters, nieces and aunts - is haunted by losses and yearnings. Ultimately, the two sisters cope differently with their unconventional situation (the image of them opening the house to the flooding of the sea is intriguing), yet the ending suggests that either way (inside or outside of society) does not offer a healing of early wounds.
The novel is magical and incredibly sad. It has sentences that are so bleak I was stunned, and scenes that kept me enchanted.

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hillbank68
uniquely lyrical, profound and beautiful
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 4 September 2011
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'Housekeeping' was Marilynne Robinson's first novel, to be followed twenty-four years later by 'Gilead' and then 'Home'. It's a hard book to describe ; the fact is that I have never read another like it. Ruth and Lucille Stone are cared for first by their mother, Helen, in Seattle, then by their grandmother in Fingerbone, a small lakeside town in Idaho (in fact based on Robinson's own home town - as a child - of Sandpoint), then by two aged great-aunts from Spokane, Nona and Lily, and finally by their mother's younger sister, Sylvie. They are accustomed from an early age to fundamental change in their circumstances, sometimes caused by sudden death. Most of the book centres on their time with Sylvie, a transient - that is, a drifter - whom Ruth, the storyteller, quickly identifies as unstable. The 'Housekeeping' of the title at least partly refers to Sylvie's brave attemtps, against her nature, to make a home, to keep house for the two girls and herslf, but the term goes beyond that into ideas of the 'house' we inhabit on earth, our fleshly existence,m and how we deal with that ; our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting. That being so, Sylvie's dreamlike approach to life appears to conform to a kind of reality that 'conventional' life misses. Perhaps she has instinctive insights which express a deeper truth than the orthodox, well-meaning community can recognise. To Ruth, it becomes a pattern which she clings on to (Lucille makes a different choice), though she sometimes finds it bewildering or exasperating. The townspeople of Fingerbone, good people many of them but only occasionally present in the book, certainly are uncomfortable with the way Sylvie behaves, particularly as the guardian of children. If they - the Fingerbone matrons, as we mostly see them - are shadowy figures, the lake and the long railway bridge which crosses it, and the physical reality of Fingerbone and its environs are certainly not. And this is where it becomes difficult to describe this book in anything like an adequate way. There is a story, and there are people, but paragraph after paragraph seems to go beyond them into 'deep' themes of impermanence, moving on, what reality and illusion are - the opposite, perhaps, of what seems obvious to us - memories of past acquaintances and generations lost in time, our own fragility and I don't know what else.

The writing is very striking indeed and very beautiful. It is a book that demands to be read with care, slowly, weighing every word. It is full of sentences or groups of sentences which resonate. In my own case, momentary inattention or lack of focus led me to re-read many paragraphs, always with increasing understanding though not always with the satisfaction of having 'got it'. You need to be to be on good reading form when you approach 'Housekeeping'. But there is never any doubt that this is remarkable writing which demands the greatest respect, and it is funny in places, and beautifully descriptive, and wistful and moving. It is full of memorable episodes - for example, the night that Ruth and Lucille spend by the lake in a very uncomfortable makeshift shelter, the theft of the boat by Sylvie and Lucille and their search for the vanished children, the crossing of the bridge at the end (and a very alarming bridge it is!). I can't do justice to this book, and enough has been written about it, much more eloquently and perceptively than this, but it is good beyond imagining, and that seems reason enough for adding a few more words in its praise.

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Housekeeping Paperback – 1 July 2010

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Marilynne Robinson

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5.0 out of 5 stars If you like her other books, you will like this one.

3.0 out of 5 stars I enjoyed other books by this author so expected to enjoy ...

5.0 out of 5 stars Magical prose

Top reviews from other countries

4.0 out of 5 stars l'histoire résumé du livre

5.0 out of 5 stars The wonders of transients, transience, truancy and trains

5.0 out of 5 stars Deeply empathetic masterpiece

5.0 out of 5 stars Mesmerizing!

5.0 out of 5 stars uniquely lyrical, profound and beautiful

If you like her other books, you will like this one.

I enjoyed other books by this author so expected to enjoy ...

Magical prose

l'histoire résumé du livre

The wonders of transients, transience, truancy and trains

Deeply empathetic masterpiece

Mesmerizing!

uniquely lyrical, profound and beautiful