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Marilynne Robinson
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Housekeeping Paperback – 1 July 2010

by Marilynne Robinson (Author)
3.9 out of 5 stars 3,636 ratings

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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  1. Print length
    224 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    St Martin's Press
  4. Publication date
    1 July 2010
  5. Dimensions
    14.07 x 1.5 x 21.06 cm
  6. ISBN-10
    0312424094
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0312424091
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  1. She was a music I no longer heard, that rang in my mind, itself and nothing else, lost to all sense, but not perished, not perished.
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  2. It is, as she said, difficult to describe someone, since memories are by their nature fragmented, isolated, and arbitrary as glimpses one has at night through lighted windows.
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  3. When she had been married a little while, she concluded that love was half a longing of a kind that possession did nothing to mitigate.
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Product description

Review

"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; First Edition (1 July 2010)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0312424094
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0312424091
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 14.07 x 1.5 x 21.06 cm
  • Customer Reviews:
    3.9 out of 5 stars 3,636 ratings

About the author

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Marilynne Robinson

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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3.9 out of 5 stars
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Top reviews from Australia

  • vivian garner
    5.0 out of 5 stars If you like her other books, you will like this one.
    Reviewed in Australia on 15 December 2022
    Verified Purchase
    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
    3.0 out of 5 stars I enjoyed other books by this author so expected to enjoy ...
    Reviewed in Australia on 2 June 2016
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    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.
    One person found this helpful
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  • sally tarbox
    5.0 out of 5 stars Magical prose
    Reviewed in Australia on 15 August 2018
    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!
    One person found this helpful
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  • Client d'Amazon
    4.0 out of 5 stars 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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  • Cliente Amazon
    5.0 out of 5 stars Deeply empathetic masterpiece
    Reviewed in Spain on 2 March 2017
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    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
    5.0 out of 5 stars Mesmerizing!
    Reviewed in Germany on 25 June 2016
    Verified Purchase
    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
    5.0 out of 5 stars 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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  • Sean O'Neill
    5.0 out of 5 stars ...row, row, row your boat, life is but a dream...
    Reviewed in the United States on 31 October 2012
    Verified Purchase
    This beautifully formed novel is about the absence of boundaries: between perception, memory, thought and dreams; between oxygen and water; between the present and the past; between one's mother, grandmother and one's self; between Seattle and Fingerbone; and, ultimately between the here and the hereafter. Each of these flows into the other in this stunningly elegant work. This seamlessness most distinguishes this novel from Robinson's other two.

    Though this was the first of her novels, it's the one I've most recently read. In fact, I've read them in reverse order. "Home," was Dostoevsky-like in the brilliant way that the characters were revealed primarily by their dialogue (including what was unsaid). Gilead was the most "traditionally" structured as an epistolary novel. But Housekeeping may truly be the most exquisitely written. Each sentence in this novel is a gem to ponder, admire, feel, and stash away to reexamine again. It is most nearly poetry in the extraordinary quality of its images, language, and ideas.

    What the three have in common, though, is clear and what may ultimately define Robinson's body of work: the passing away and the passing forward of one generation to the next. For all the transience and ephemera that is "written" as the experience of Housekeeping, what is permanent, here and in her other works, is the contrast between that and the nearly tangible solidity and reliability of family. In Home, it was largely a two dimensional tale, a reframing of the Prodigal Son. In Gilead, it was only different from Housekeeping, in gender. Three generations of men, each paradoxically different in character, yet ultimately bearing the traits, expressions and even thoughts of their forbears. In Housekeeping likewise, Grandmother, to mother, to daughter, its the affinity of character and disposition and image, that is carried forward, and the differences in circumstances which fade.

    This struck me, most startlingly in Housekeeping, when Sylvie, the central character, a drifter and eccentric, seemingly abandons her niece, Ruthie, outside of a remote, abandoned home in a lake valley haunted, in Ruthie's mind, by the spirits of their mutually lost loved ones, and to Ruthie's own nightmares and reverie, and then, as she ultimately awakens her niece and walks her back in the cold and darkening dusk to their perilously tethered rowboat, stops on the way to peer into Ruthie's face, dispassionately and almost studiously, to look behind her eyes and into the soul of Ruthie's mother and her own departed sister.

    Sylvie, herself, is a wondrous character. She is both irrepressibly prone to wander and grateful to be grounded by the task of caring (not all that well) for her niece, the constant reminder of her own sister. She seems lost in thought and without a care for things material to her own well being, yet she obsesses over collecting and stacking worthless tin cans, and cherishes her trips to town to buy baubles for her nieces. When she disappears, as she constantly seems to be doing, we don't know any better than the two nieces in her charge whether she will be returning or pulled by the tide of her urge to wander away from Fingerbone.

    While some here have complained about the sobriety of this novel, and it is indeed quite somber in bits, it also contained some of the most humorous episodes I've read in Robinson's works. The way that young Ruthie's (and her sister's) grand-aunts and reluctant caretakers (before Sylvie's arrival) converse as if one person, and then go to ratify each other's statements, in between wishing they were "anywhere but here", had me chuckling out loud. Likewise, the conversations between the officiously charitable town women, out to rescue Ruthie from her aunt's eccentric ways, and our heroine Sylvie,added enough of the comedy of real life brought welcome balance and "terra firma" to the often dream-like experiences of the lives here described.

    The novel is set in the valley of a flood-ravaged and remote, lakeside town of Fingerbone (which almost humorously describes the damp chill that pervades the environment of this story). The water that's unrelentingly central to it's theme of flowing and receding waters of consciousness and experience so infuses the novel's pages that there are times when this reader felt himself becoming saturated with the weight of it. What made that particularly fitting, and more than a little ironic, is that I started the book on my Kindle shortly before Hurricane Sandy started raining on our Philadelphia suburb and finished it just as Sandy was moving out and northwestward of what had become our own Fingerbone of a home without power, heat and light surrounded by the soggy and chilly air around us, and left with nothing to distract us from our own memories, thought and dreams- except an exceptionally good book by the best writer in my own middle aged but "relatively" recent experience.
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