I finished reading Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping this weekend. I've been meaning to read it, of course, for years. I'm actually glad I waited so long because now I can go out today and buy Gilead instead of waiting for years, hoping she'll write something else. I especially found the last few chapters among the loveliest prose I've read.
The summary on the back on my copy says the book is about "the dangerous and deep undertow of transcience," but I'm not sure that gets it right. Yes, the book is about transcience, but I don't think any judgments are made about its merits. (and maybe the blurb writer was just trying to be cute with the emphasis on water). Dangerous suggests avoidabililty. It's not such a new thing that Robinson is saying, that life is transcience and memory pulls at us because it's an acknowledgement of loss. But what I adore about the way she says all of these things is the way she links it to housekeeping, the mundane acts of dusting and straightening.
I've never thought about this much, how we try to affirm our own permanence by keeping house. I am generally a disinterested housekeeper, but recently I have become strangely attentive to domestic chores. This weekend I cleaned cupboards and sorted stacks of paper in my office and painted. I was particularly caught up in the painting, and I was inexplicably upset when the plan I had for my kitchen stools didn't quite work out. Then I finished reading the book and started wondering about my motivations. I think I can comfortably say (I'm still contemplating the matter) that my efforts at cleaning and painting were efforts to work myself out of a lingering funk. My own life has seemed starkly about transcience lately, and perhaps newly painted stools and tidy cupboards will ward it off.
3 comments:
I will have to reread Housekeeping. I had to read it for my MA exams at Western and I don't think I read it slowly enough to appreciate it. As to your last post, I think it would make a wonderful memoiry/personal/creative nonfictiony essay. I found myself wanting to read more.
I love Housekeeping--one of my all time favorite novels. I found an excerpt from it in a fiction anthology I was perusing for other purposes just this morning (while standing in line), and got lost in that gorgeous language of hers. I agree with Middlebrow that your post is evocative in much the same way.
The excerpt I read had the narrator (the non-Lucille sister) talking about the discomforts of the outdoors, while Sylvie is almost oblivious to them. The sister says that it's cold, Sylvie says, "the sun will be up soon." The sister notes that Sylvie barely seems to register her wet clothes and shoes. It also had the fallen-in house part, which is almost unearthly, it is so beautiful. It reminds me a lot of Frost's poem "Directive," in which he says, "this was no play house but a house in earnest"--which suggests, along the lines of your own meditation, that we keep house partly to keep a sense of being sheltered and "covered," as it were--because all such beliefs are illusory, after all. Thanks for reminding me of this wonderful book.
I didn't like this book the first time I read it. The second time I read it, I loved it. I think there is something hypnotic about her prose, but the first time I think I stood outside it and was "studying" it. Strangely, the second time I was reading it for my PhD exams, (the theme of the house and all) and I got sucked in. I love the narrator and all the images of the train underwater. Everyone I've ever talked to likes to mention all the Biblical themes, but (my ignorance, I guess) I read it mostly as a feminist magical tale.
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