Book Review: Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
Reviewed by Amy Bangerter

aaaaix pages into her sensuous novel, Housekeeping (Bantam Books, 1980), Marilynne Robinson is already questioning our traditional concepts of belonging. She does this by giving us numerous examples of people who neither belong, nor do not belong, but occupy some wonderfully ethereal place in the middle.
Robinson first introduces us to our pre-adolescent protagonist Ruth as one who has been raised by various family members, all of whom are constantly in the process of leaving her. Long after her father has disappeared, Ruth and her sister Lucille are deposited by their mother on the doorstep of their grandmother's house along with a box of graham crackers to keep boredom at bay. After her grandmother's death, Ruth and Lucille are looked after by their grandmother's elderly sisters, and eventually they are left to the care of their mother's sister Sylvie, a drifter-turned-guardian. Yet despite Ruth's apparent familial displacement, she resides in the same town in the same house for the bulk of the novel: the house her grandfather built. Ruth's familial ties are also ties to the landscape which surrounds the town of Fingerbone as her grandfather is buried at the bottom of the lake which seems to brood over the town, a	a	a
victim of a train's midnight plunge off the railroad bridge. Her mother's body also lies at the bottom of the lake, a victim of an apparent suicide. aaaa The house is so rooted to the town and to the land that it cannot be destroyed by fire nor flood. Indeed, after the lake floods one year and nearly destroys the entire town, it is Ruth's house alone which seems almost untouched, as if somehow its contents of soggy sofas and warped woods have made it more native. Through the character of Aunt Sylvie, Robinson questions the traditional boundaries between inside and outside, clean and dirty, foreign and native. Under Sylvie's care, the house and the landscape which surround it seem to merge together and become a single entity. It was at the time that Sylvie began walking through the house carrying a broom that Ruth first noticed the collection of leaves in the corners of the home. Thus the house and the orchard became "finely tuned" to each other, Ruth notes, as the boundaries between them became as thin as the veins on the stale leaves rustling on the living room floor. Indeed, the concept of housekeeping is vital to the idea of belonging in the novel. It is because of Sylvie's unconventional ideas about housekeeping that the townspeople decide she is unfit for raising the children, and their actions lead to the inevitable conclusion of the novel. It is not the family's reputation as standoffish and self-sufficient which leads to their conflict with the community, but rather their unconventional treatment of what it means to belong to somewhere or to someone that leads to their ironic exclusion from their house, their community, and the town. aaaa Housekeeping is a linguistic masterpiece. It is a book to be savored for the structure of its plot, its sentences, its syllables. It's beauty and translucence are almost alienating at times, as if the reader feels like an outsider, riffling through the book's pages and peeking into the heartache of lives so similar to our own and yet so uniquely their own. But perhaps that was Robinson's intention after all: to question our definitions of belonging and help us refine our ability to bend.