Housekeeping: A Novel
Marilynne Robinson
Language: English
Pages: 219
ISBN: 0312424094
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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.
Reader's Digest International (March 2015)
Doing the Best I Can: Fatherhood in the Inner City
side.” “Maybe the bushes have moved.” Sylvie and I started a smoldery fire and boiled water for tea and soup, and Lucille piled up the fallen wood and swept the bobbing clothespins behind the pantry curtain with a broom (it was the same broom we used to whack the woodpile before we used any wood from it, so that the spiders and mice would be warned away, and would not bite our fingers or drop into our sleeves, or perish in the stove flames). Lily and Nona, in their alarm at leaving the house to
house, and never tell me where she was going, and she smiled with a smug delight if, just to offer conversation, I asked her where she had been. I was pretty sure that she was with the older girls we had seen at the drugstore, or with someone else who would be useful to her in the same way. Once, I noticed that she was gone from the house, and I ran out to the road. There she was, two blocks away, walking toward town. The road was deep in dust as fine as atoms, and the sun was very hot. I started
her elbows, reading, and if I said, “When you’re tired of that let’s go to the lake,” she replied, “Go away, Ruthie.” Sometimes I brought out a book, too, and sat down in the grass, but her concentration distracted me and I would do something juvenile, like pelting her book with clovers and twigs, or laughing out loud at anything I found to be slightly amusing in my book. She would sigh and get up and walk into the house. If I followed her she would say, “I’ll lock myself in the bathroom if I
into them? “There’s still some soup left,” I would say. Sylvie would shake her head, no thank you. One night as we sat like that, Lucille left for a dance, wearing an apricot dress she had made in the sewing room at school. She pulled her school coat over her shoulders without putting her arms in the sleeves, said good night, and went out to wait for her date by the side of the road. When Lucille closed the door behind her the house seemed very empty. I sat alone, watching Sylvie, and it
sees all the difference between here and there, this and that. Perhaps all unsheltered people are angry in their hearts, and would like to break the roof, spine, and ribs, and smash the windows and flood the floor and spindle the curtains and bloat the couch. I began pulling loose planks out of the cellar hole, the right corner at the front. They were splintery and full of snaggled nails, but I pulled them out and tossed them onto the ground behind me, for all the world as if I had some real