Mind Picker: Housekeeping

Thus finely did our house become attuned to the orchard and to the particularities of weather, even in the first days of Sylvie's housekeeping. Thus did she begin by littles and perhaps unawares to ready it for wasps and bats and barn swallows. Sylvie talked a great deal about housekeeping. She soaked all the tea towels for a number of weeks in a tub of water and bleach. She emptied several cupboards and left them open to air, and once she washed half the kitchen ceiling and a door. Sylvie believed in stern solvents, and most of all in air. It was for the sake of air that she opened doors and windows, though it was probably through forgetfulness that she left them open. It was for the sake of air that on one early splendid day she wrestled my grandmother's plum-colored davenport into the front yard, where it remained until it weathered pink.

The whole plot of Housekeeping happens in the first two sentences:

My name is Ruth. I grew up with my younger sister, Lucille, under the care of my grandmother, Mrs. Sylvia Foster, and when she died, of her sisters-in-law, Misses Lily and Nona Foster, and when they fled, of her daughter, Mrs. Sylvia Fisher.

So, yeah, Housekeeping isn't about the plot, no matter how nice and orderly that progression of guardians sounds. There's nothing orderly in this book. Quick story: When I was in grade twelve English, we were told to research and assemble ten poems on any theme, make them into a little booklet, and be prepared to recite one of them to the class. I pondered it, decided that since water imagery had a profound effect on me, I should choose that as my theme. When I was called on to present and I said my theme was water, the teacher looked a little surprised and asked why I had chosen something so basic. And I couldn't answer that question: water imagery is so fundamentally interesting to me that I had assumed it was to everyone. She may as well have asked me what is the attraction of a drumbeat or the purpose of laughter. They feed my soul? They make me aware that I have a soul? In the same vein, I would be hard pressed to answer why I found Housekeeping so engaging: yes, on a literal level, it is awash in water imagery, but go deeper, and it just spoke to me. As such, this review will mostly be quotes: if they speak to you, too, you just might like to read this book.

The basics: Ruth and Lucille, after being taken care of by their single mother in Seattle (to the barest of minimums), are deposited at the family home in Fingerbone, Idaho to be taken on by their aged grandmother. Fingerbone. The town of Fingerbone is given to descriptive lists, of the sort that make me mentally swoon:

What with the lake and the railroads, and what with blizzards and floods and barn fires and forest fires and the general availability of shotguns and bear traps and homemade liquor and dynamite, what with the prevalence of loneliness and religion and the rages and the ecstasies they induce, and the closeness of families, violence was inevitable.

The most significant geographic feature of Fingerbone – in addition to the encircling mountains – is the glacial lake that looms at the townside:

It seemed that Sylvie's boat slipped down the west side of every wave. We would make a circle, and never reach a shore at all, if there were a vortex, I thought, and we would be drawn down into the darker world, where other sounds would pour into our ears until we seemed to find songs in them, and the sight of water would invade our eyes, and the taste of water would invade our bowels and unstring our bones, and we would know the seasons and customs of the place as if there were no others.

Unstring our bones; I love it I love it I love it. This Sylvie, put in charge of two young girls, is hardly guardian material:

When we did come home Sylvie would certainly be home, too, enjoying the evening, for so she described her habit of sitting in the dark. Evening was her special time of day. She gave the word three syllables, and indeed I think she liked it so well for its tendency to smooth, to soften. 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. She preferred it sunk in the very element it was meant to exclude. We had crickets in the pantry, squirrels in the eaves, sparrows in the attic. Lucille and I stepped through the door from sheer night to sheer night.

And the water water everywhere! The water that blows in on the wind, that bubbles cold beneath the gardens and cellars, that has claimed the girls' family through the generations:

I cannot taste a cup of water but I recall that the eye of the lake is my grandfather's, and that the lake's heavy, blind, encumbering waters composed my mother's limbs and weighed her garments and stopped her breath and stopped her sight. There is remembrance, and communion, altogether human and unhallowed. For families will not be broken. Curse and expel them, send their children wandering, drown them in floods and fires, and old women will make songs out of all these sorrows and sit in the porches and sing them on mild evenings. Every sorrow suggests a thousand songs, and every song recalls a thousand sorrows, and so they are infinite in number, and all the same.

So here's the thing: I was constantly rereading passages – savouring some and flailing to make sense of others – and the words were challenging, and consistently, rewarding. You may read that some consider this feminist fiction – there are no significant male characters – but that feels like a ghettoization; if anything, with the womblike waters and the maternal themes (this is called Housekeeping, after all), I'd be more likely to call this feminine fiction; equal to masculine, but decidedly different. I've read some two star reviews and couldn't deny the criticisms, and I've read some five stars reviews, and couldn't deny the praise. Marilynne Robinson in this, her first novel, comes off as a bit of a madwoman; what can one make of this:

Of my conception I know only what you know of yours. It occurred in darkness and I was unconsenting. I (and that slenderest word is too gross for the rare thing I was then) walked forever through reachless oblivion, in the mood of one smelling night-blooming flowers, and suddenly – My ravishers left their tracers in me, male and female, and over the months I rounded, grew heavy, until the scandal could no longer be concealed and oblivion expelled me. But this I have in common with all my kind. By some bleak alchemy what had been mere unbeing becomes death when life is mingled with it. So they seal the door against us returning.

I stand and cheer at that; just don't ask me to explain why. I'll need to remember to reread this book someday.