Housekeeping
by Marilynne Robinson
read: 2012
Time 100 Novels,
PEN/Hemingway Award
Normally when I write about novels, I write about themes. Details are too fussy and insignificant to a whole book. But
Housekeeping is in a lot of ways about details. It's named after the mundane process of making sure the house is in order, but as with seemingly everything in the novel, it's metaphorical. The knick-knacks and trash that fill the house where Ruth, her sister Lucille, and their Aunt Sylvie reflect big profundities. "What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?" narrator Ruth asks at one point, and she might be talking about the novel itself.
Every scrap in
Housekeeping is aching with meaning and memory. One of the most devastating moments in the book is when Ruth looks something up in the dictionary and finds pressed flowers her grandfather had left in the book. Her sister Lucille, who has little nostalgia, burns the flowers, to Ruth's dismay. Their grandfather died before they were born, and while they can't know why he deemed those worth keeping, they provide a link between the living and the dead. Things build these kind of bridges throughout the novel:
Such details are merely accidental. Who could know but us? And since their thoughts were bent upon other ghosts than ours, other darknesses than we had seen, why must we be left, the survivors picking among flotsam, among the small, unnoticed, unvalued clutter that was all that remained when they vanished, that only catastrophe made notable?
Things help us remember those we've lost. But memory itself is a curse. Ruth altruistically decides to become a transient with her Aunt Sylvie, because she can't bear the thought of becoming a ghost in Sylvie's memory. She spends much of the last chapter envisioning how her sister Lucille, who believes Ruth and Sylvie dead, might imagine or not imagine she sees them. Ruth's and Lucille's mother committed suicide when the girls were young, and Ruth blames her not for abandoning them but for haunting them. She never addresses her feeling of loss; instead her mother's suicide falls like a shadow over the whole story.
If that sounds depressing, it is. This desire not to be a ghost to others seems to be the only that keeps Ruth from following her mother's path and killing herself, but there is an appeal in death. "Darkness is the only solvent," she says at one point, and at another she describes herself as "unconsenting" in her own conception. "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." Bleak alchemy, indeed.
