Genius Toiling in Obscurity

Housekeeping: The novel

Last week I borrowed Marilynne Robinson's novel Housekeeping from the local library. This was one of my favorite books back in the 80s, and has inexplicably disappeared from my personal collection, so I decided to re-read it and decide whether it was worth replacing.

I think yes. It's still a strange book about people who are connected to life and to each other by only the most tenuous of threads. Practically everyone in it runs away from their family, from the grandpa who leaves his family in the midwest in search of mountains, to the oldest aunt Molly who is only in the book long enough to become a missionary and disappear forever, to the mother who commites suicide, to the maiden aunts who flee back to their residence hotel in Seattle after a brief stint of caring for the orphaned girls, to Lucille who leaves her family in search of a normal life as a normal girl, to Ruthie and Sylvie who disappear into the darkness cloaking a railroad bridge at night.

It is still a lyrical book, worth reading like a long poem, especially the final four pages beginning with Ruthie's imagining of her conception:

Of my conception I know only what you know of yours. It occurred in darkness and I was unconsenting.... My ravishers left their traces in me, male and female, and over the months I grew rounded, 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 our returning.

Then there is the matter of my mother's abandonment of me. Again, this is the common experience.... The only mystery is that we expect it to be otherwise.

The ending of this book, with Ruthie imagining her sister Lucille in a cafe in Boston, is devastating:

No one watching this woman smear her initials in the steam on her water glass with her first finger, or slip cellophane packets of oyster crackers into her handbag for the sea gulls, could know how her thoughts are thronged by our absence, or know how she does not watch, does not listen, does not wait, does not hope, and always for me and Sylvie.

The whole book is about absence, and about people who wait yet do not wait, who wait without hope, for their loved ones to return. That sounds gloomy, and as an optimist who lives (mostly) cheerily in a web of loving connections, I might find it too much of a downer. But the language, the language, the language. You could read this whole book out loud, over and over, like a poem.

I remember meeting a friend of Marilynne Robinson's back in my first round of grad school, at Rutgers--or maybe in my second round, at Goddard, which seems more likely--and saying that I was looking forward to her next novel. "She has no plans to write a second novel," the friend said, and I was sorry to hear it. I'm not so sorry now, because I understand that one novel can be a career (see To Kill a Mockingbird) and how a person can devote themselves to something in one stage of their life and then move on to other things.

But when I was searching the library catalog for Housekeeping, I came across another book by Robinson, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought. Since I like essays better than novels in general, I was pretty excited. Alas, as an essayist, Robinson is tiresome. Though she is undoubtedly very smart and insightful, I do not think I will make it through the book, bogged down as I find myself in passages like these:

This does not by any means inply the moral equality of every act that can be construed as rewarding to the one who carries it out, without reference to its consequences. Nor does it imply that apparently selfless conduct is in fact merely less honest than straightforward selfishness.

Yawn. And again I say, yawn. If the back of The Death of Adam didn't say that it was by the author of the acclaimed novel Housekeeping, I would think I had wandered onto a different writer with the same name. Come to think of it, maybe I have.

Posted by Su Penn at February 2, 2003 06:51 PM | TrackBack