Marilynne Robinson grew up in Sandpoint, Idaho, on the shores of Lake Pend Oreille, which is French for Lake Hanging Ear. As place names go, Hanging Ear is pretty interesting, in a picturesque sort of way. It makes us think “There must be quite a story there!” The fictional locale of Housekeeping is also a smallish town next to a large lake. Robinson gives both lake and town the name of Fingerbone. Now there’s a place name for you–more evocative than Sandpoint, more complicated, more precise, and somehow even more intimate than Hanging Ear. The fictional name also entails a history, but what kind of history? Sure, there’s a story there, but are we sure we want to hear it?
Well, it is a wonderful story, superbly told. It is about two sisters, Ruth and Lucille, and how they come of age. Their mother, Helen, grew up in Fingerbone, but when she married she went to live in a large city, presumably Seattle. Ruth remembers a top floor city apartment from when she was young, and remembers too their downstairs neighbor, named Beatrice, who watched the girls while their mother worked at the cosmetics counter in a drugstore. The girls’ father was long gone and they have no memories of him. One day, when Ruth is seven and Lucille a year or two younger, their mother borrows a car and brings the girls back to their grandmother’s house in Fingerbone. She chooses to arrive at a time when she knows her mother will be at church. She settles the children on the porch with a box of graham crackers and leaves them there. So the girls live with their grandmother for a few years. Their grandfather is long gone, having died in a railroad accident many years before. When their grandmother also dies, the girls discover that she has arranged for her two maiden sisters-in-law to take over their care. The two old maids leave their tiny hotel room in Spokane and move into the old family house in Fingerbone. But the situation is challenging for them and after a year or so they begin to speak fondly of their old lodgings and their old way of life. They decide to return to Spokane, leaving the house and the two girls behind. To care for the girls, they manage to locate Sylvie, Helen’s younger sister. Sylvie had left Fingerbone long ago–not long after Helen–and had married a man named Fisher. Mr. Fisher was long gone by this point and Sylvie herself was heard from only infrequently. In the crisis, however, she is located and prevailed upon to return to Fingerbone, where she will move into her mother’s old house and care for her sister’s two girls, who by this time are entering their teens. As soon as she arrives, the maiden sisters-in-law make their escape.
In the course of their childhood, then, the girls are subject to four regimes of housekeeping: first their mother Helen assisted by their neighbor Beatrice, then their calm and practical grandmother, then the two old maids, and lastly their aunt Sylvie. The last regime is the heart of the book; the others, powerful as they are, just set the stage. I won’t try to describe Sylvie or reveal what happens during her time with the girls; let the book do that. But there is one thing that we come to see soon enough: Sylvie is not meant for housekeeping. Sylvie crystallizes everything that has gone before, all the previous regimes, all the characters of all the other women, the whole meaning of transience and stasis. Let’s not keep house at all, she says, let’s do something else.
You wouldn’t know it from what I’ve just described, but part of the genius of Housekeeping is that it brims with humor. The humor is not always obvious and there is never a moment when you feel like Robinson is trying to tell a funny story. On the contrary, it is an aching and poignant story. But the feeling here is that sadness comes from imagining things as they could be or could have been, if only. It comes from our ego and our desires, our wish for the world be the way we wish it to be. But if you look at the world without desire and see it the way it is, it’s pretty funny. As Elizabeth Jane Howard says, “Robinson’s humor is of the kind that makes you smile from its truth.”
Inseparable from all this is the style and tone of Housekeeping. Robinson’s language, says Walker Percy, is “as sharp and clear as light and air and water.” It is distilled and pure, as close to truth as words can come. There are a lot of novels around; this one is the real deal.