A Brief Book Review of Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
I first encountered Marilynne Robinson through her wonderful novel “Gilead”. I followed this by reading an excellent collection of essays she wrote titled “When I Was a Child I Read Books”. After that I came across a stimulating conversation in the New York Review of Books between her and President Barack Obama, who while he was in office flew to her home in Iowa to speak with her. This is all to say that my encounters with Marilynne Robinson have all been distinct and pleasing experiences. “Housekeeping” is no different. This book is beautiful and terrific. The story is set in the Pacific northwest and is about family and sisterhood and loss and reemergence and memory and community and mental health and independence and so much more. It’s a lot. Robinson’s writing is so vivid, so thoughtful, and so biblical that I found myself rereading passages for the shear pleasure of soaking in her artistry. The best way to enjoy her writing is slowly. Even if you think you read quickly, her style forces you to slow down and sit with her characters and scenes and ideas. And for this she rewards the patient. Her writing crescendos in the most wonderful ways. Some favorite excerpts below:
“She did not speak to me, or look back. The absolute black of the sky dulled and dimmed and blanched slowly away, and finally half a dozen daubs of cloud, dull powder pink, sailed high in a pale-green sky, rust-red at the horizon. Venus shone a heatless planetary white among these parrot colors, and earth lay unregenerate so long that it seemed to me for once all these blandishments might fail. The birds of our world were black motes in that tropic.” (p. 117)
“I had seen two of the apple trees in my grandmother’s orchard die where they stood. One spring there were no leaves, but they stood there as if expectantly, their limbs almost to the ground, miming their perished fruitfulness. Every winter the orchard is flooded with snow, and every spring the waters are parted, death is undone, and every Lazarus rises, except these two. They have lost their bark and blanched white, and a wind will snap their bones, but if ever a leaf does appear, it should be no great wonder. It would be a small change, as it would be, say, for the moon to begin turning on its axis. It seemed to me that what perished need not also be lost. At Sylvie’s house, my grandmother’s house, so much of what I remembered I could hold in my hand—like a china cup, or a windfall apple, sour and cold from its affinity with deep earth, with only a trace of the perfume of its blossoming. Sylvie, I knew, felt the life of perished things.” (p. 124)