It is true that one is always aware of the lake in Fingerbone, or the deeps of the lake, the lightless, airless waters below.

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary

Housekeeping is a story about leaving and being left behind, and what happens to the echoes of our souls when our centers are disrupted. Our protagonists are a pair of sisters, Ruthie and Lucille, but we're closer to Ruthie because she's narrating the story. They are young girls who are abandoned by their mother and left to be raised in their grandmother's home in Fingerbone, Idaho. (To be fully transparent, I don't know if she ever explicitly places Fingerbone in Idaho, but according to the interwebs this is where it is. It makes sense since I had it somewhere between Washington and Montana in my brain.)  Ruthie and Lucille's mother, Helen, drives her neighbor Bernice's car off a cliff after dropping the girls off at her mother's house (with graham crackers, of course). Sylvia, their grandmother, looks after the girls fairly well, having raised three daughters of her own (Helen, as mentioned; Molly, a missionary; and Sylvie; hold, please). Sylvia's husband died in a railroad accident (the train went straight into the lake) so she has no one but herself to rely on. Sylvia eventually dies, being no spring chicken, and her sisters-in-law Lily and Nona, a pair of equally old ladies, come to care for the house (and the girls). They are not interested in this life at all, considering they had a cozy home at a hotel with no little girls before, and so they are constantly hoping for Sylvie to return, assuming her youth will make her more fit to raise her nieces. 

Eventually, Sylvie does indeed return, and as the aunts had hoped, she agrees to take over the duties of the house and the girls. Ruthie and Lucille grow up somewhat wild, having such a wide variety of caretakers and often very little (or no) supervision. Ruthie doesn't particularly mind not having other friends or not doing well in school, but Lucille wants increasingly to be 'normal' and fit in. The girls grow apart, and Sylvie, though still physically present (most of the time) is increasingly absent. Ruthie moves out to live with the school's home economics teacher, and after an incident involving a stolen boat and a frozen night spent outside, the sheriff comes to let Sylvie know there will be a hearing about Ruthie's care. Sylvie tries briefly to clean up her caretaking act, but it's too little, too late, and Ruthie and she both know it. They make a rather haphazard attempt at lighting the house on fire (hoping everyone will assume they died in it) but it doesn't really take, so they make a precarious escape by walking across the railroad bridge over the lake in the dead of night and catching the morning train out of town. No one thinks they could have survived, so they are presumed dead, and they become a pair of itinerants, caroming from town to town for short spells at a time, lost but also found.

Spoiler Over: Continue Here

Dear blobbists,

How are you? I know things have been nuts lately, and not in a good way. I hope you have a moment of comfort today, tonight, this week - something that brings you hygge in the midst of this strange world we're living in. 

I'm not sure how I felt about this book. I mean, I didn't love the experience of reading it (though there were many parts I very much enjoyed) but when I was writing about it to summarize the plot, there were many things I realized I liked. So maybe it's the kind of book that grows on you? I'll speak from the "I" perspective and say it grew on me. Here are some reflections for you. 

On mothering

Even though Sylvie is sort of 'mothered out' by the time Ruthie and Lucille make it to her, I love this description of her with her three daughters. It reminded me of so many things my mother did that did, indeed, seem like grace. 

She had always known a thousand ways to circle them all around with what must have seemed like grace. Her bread was tender and her jelly was tart, and on rainy days she made cookies and applesauce. In the summer she kept roses in a vase on the piano, huge, pungent roses, and when the blooms ripened and the petals fell, she put them in a tall Chinese jar, with cloves and thyme and sticks of cinnamon. Her children slept on starched sheets under layers of quilts, and in the morning her curtains filled with light the way sails filled with wind. 

On knowing people

I loved this line of Ruthie's, as she thinks about what she wishes Sylvie would tell her about her mother, Helen. 

• Did she tell lies? Could she keep secrets? Did she tickle, or slap, or pinch, or punch, or grimace? 

It reminded me of Le Petit Prince, and the way he chastises grown-ups for not asking the right kinds of questions of their new friends: 

Quand vous leur parlez d'un nouvel ami, elles ne vous questionnent jamais sur l'essentiel. Elles ne vous disent jamais: <<Quel est le son de sa vois? Quels sont les jeux qu'il préfère? Est-ce qu'il collectionne les papillons?>>

When you last told an adult about a new acquaintance, did you lead with the sound of their voice? Their laugh? Their face? Did you talk about how they collect butterflies and think about their favorite games? I like the idea of us shifting to this new method of introduction: "Here is my new friend, XYZ - she loves the smell of a campfire and playing Hearts, and her voice sounds like wind chimes."

On remembering their mother as two different people

I loved the way that Ruthie and Lucille reflected on the loss of their mother, as painful as it was. 

We would have known nothing of the nature and reach of her sorrow if she had come back. But she left us and broke the family and the sorrow was released.

She talks about how she and Lucille have two different versions of their mother, and that they are not at all the same. It's so true that when we reflect back our memories of someone, they rarely conjoin in their entirety. 

My mother was happy that day, we did not know why. And if she was sad the next, we did not know why. And if she was gone the next, we did not know why. It was as if she righted herself continually against some current that never ceased to pull. She swayed continuously, like a thing in water, and it was graceful, a slow dance, a sad and heady dance. Admittedly, one of the things I loved about this book was the way it captured mental health. It's not given any clear names, but it's apparent from Helen's suicide, Sylvie's behavior, and Ruthie's habits that there's a strain of something - depression, bipolar, OCD - floating in their family line. I thought this description Ruthie wrote about her mother was one of the closest written descriptions of how I sometimes feel as I navigate the world. 

It was a relief to go to Latin class, where I had a familiar place in a human group, alphabetically assigned. Ruthie has a very difficult time with school (and socializing in general) but I loved that she felt at home in Latin class, alphabetically assigned, especially since my mom is a beloved Latin teacher, and her alphabetical class (half on blue days, half on grey) is probably one of the only familiar places in a human group for many children these days. 

On looking after each other

I loved the circularity of the fact that first Ruthie and Lucille's upstairs neighbor Bernice tries to keep an eye on them - She looked after us by trying to sleep lightly enough to be awakened by the first sounds of fist fights, of the destruction of furniture, of household poisoning.

And then later Ruthie and Lucille find themselves keeping tabs on Sylvie - But as surely as we tried to stay awake to know for certain whether she sang, or wept, or left the house, we fell asleep and dreamed that she did.

On sisters

• We stayed awake the whole night because Lucille was afraid of her dreams. I loved this line. The bond of sisterhood was something that really resonated with me, too. 

On Nona and Lily

The description of Nona and Lily was one of my favorite things about this book. Here's how she describes their communication style: 

They shouted, for the sake of the other's comprehension and because neither of them could gauge her voice very well, and each of them considered her sister's hearing worse than her own, so each of them spoke a little louder than she had to. 

It seemed then and always to be the elaboration and ornamentation of the consensus between them, which was as intricate and well-tended as a termite castle. 

And they had lived all their lives together, and felt that they had a special language between them. So when Lily said, with a glance at Nona, 'What a lovely dress', it was as if to say, 'She seems rather sane! She seems rather normal!' And when Nona said, 'You look very well', it was as if to say, 'Perhaps she'll do! Perhaps she can stay and we can go!'

Here's a hilarious sampling of their dialogue: 

'A pity!'

'A pity, a pity!'

'Sylvia wasn't old.'

'She wasn't young.'

'She was old to be looking after children.'

'She was young to pass away.'

'Seventy-six?'

'Was she seventy-six?'

'That's not old.'

'No.'

'Not old for her family.'lololololz. I love it. 

On Sylvie

I love that even though Sylvie ends up being a bit of a loose cannon, she seems like perfection to Ruthie and Lucille. 

• We were prepared to perform great feats of docility to keep her.

Here are some things Sylvie likes: eating cold food, dining in the dark. Not exactly selling herself, eh?  ;)

Sylvie did not want to lose me... She could speak to herself, or to someone in her thoughts, with pleasure and animation, even while I sat beside her - this was the measure of our intimacy, that she gave almost no thought to me at all.

On the house

I loved the way the house figured in the novel. It reminded me of Beloved and To the Lighthouse, and stories where the house is as much a character as the people who inhabit it. 

What could it matter? It seemed to me that the fragility of our household was by now so great that the breach was inevitable, and so it was futile to worry whether there was wisdom or sense in any particular scheme to save it. One thing or another would put an end to it soon.

Absolutely Fabulous Lines

Marilynne Robinson is a master of the writing craft. Here are some of her most spectacular turns of phrase. 

• He held this post for two years, when, as he was returning from some business in Spokane, his mortal and professional careers ended in a spectacular derailment. I'm not sure if this counts as zeugma, but that's probably part of why I love it so much. ;)

• The train, which was black and sleek and elegant, and was called the Fireball, had pulled more than halfway across the bridge when the engine nosed over toward the lake and then the rest of the train slid after it into the water like a weasel sliding off a rock.

• Bernice, who lived below us, was our only visitor. She had lavender lips and orange hair, and arched eyebrows each drawn in a single brown line, a contest between practice and palsy which sometimes ended at her ear.

• It was our custom to prowl the dawn of any significant day.

• Lucille saw in everything its potential for invidious change.

• Dawn and its excesses always reminded me of heaven, a place where I have always known I would not be comfortable. I love this line so much.

Referents and Reverberations

This book reminded me of many books:

• To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
• We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson
• Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury
• Hotel New Hampshire, John Irving
• I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
• The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison
• Mandy, Julie Andrews

Speaking of growing on me, I realize looking at this list that they are some of my all-time favorite books. Not a complete list, by any means, but still. Perhaps that's why I wanted to like this book?

I loved this line:

• For whatever reason, our whole family was standoffish. This was the fairest description of our best qualities, and the kindest description of our worst faults. 

It reminded me of this line from Hotel New Hampshire: 

'You see,' Franny would explain, years later. 'We aren't eccentric; we're not bizarre. 'To each other', Franny would say, 'we're as common as rain.' And she was right; to each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread, we were just a family.

I'll leave you with a few of my favorite lines that I found particularly fitting for the present times. 

They had no reason to look forward, nothing to regret. Their lives spun off the tilting world like thread off a spindle, breakfast time, suppertime, lilac time, apple time. 

Goodness, don't you feel like time has felt this way lately? All the days and moments blurring together, but also somehow spinning off kilter? 

Sometimes it seemed to me my grandmother saw our black souls dancing in the moonless cold and offered us deep-dish apple pie as a gesture of well-meaning and despair. 

This is such a fantastic image, and it makes me want to dance in the moonless cold and then demand deep-dish apple pie. 

I'll leave you with this last one, from Ruthie, at the end of the book: 

 

Someday when I am feeling presentable I will go into Fingerbone and make inquiries. I must do it soon, for such days are rare now.

That's about how I feel on the regular; someday when I'm feeling presentable I'll join the real world again. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but we'll get there. ;) 

Keep each other safe, keep faith, and keep on reading!