Housekeeping

 

Summary (from the publisher): 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.

Review: This is one of the best books I've read in many months primarily because of its simple but lyrical language. Housekeeping is narrated by Ruth, who grows up with her sister Lucille under the care of a series of female relatives including their grandmother, two great-aunts, and finally their aunt Sylvie after their mother dies.

Although the vocabulary and language of Housekeeping is remarkably simple, this novel cannot be read quickly but rather intentionally. I found myself unable to read it without underlining and circling passages and beautiful phrases. Similes like "as methodical as a caterpillar on a straw," "watching gulls fly like sparks up the face of clouds that dragged rain the length of the lake," and "the mountains, grayed and flattened by distance, looked like remnants of a broken dam, or like the broken lip of an iron pot, just at a simmer, endlessly distilling water into light" struck me with their unique and precise way of calling an image to the mind. 

Throughout the novel is the specter of the glacier lake and of the town of Fingerbone. Before her birth, Ruth's grandfather derailed a train, killing all aboard as it crashed into the lake. Years later, her mother drives her car into the lake. The sense of the lake, with the bodies still present in its depths, looms over the characters throughout as they catch fish and travel in boats across its water. The town of Fingerbone itself is presented as close to its own character with one collective opinion; "we had both become conscious of Fingerbone all around us, if not watching, then certainly aware of everything we did."

The narrative is sharply divided from the first and second half of the novel. In the beginning, Ruth and Lucille are very much inseparable and little of their characters is described. In the second half, Lucille pulls away from the intransient and odd habits of Sylvie and Ruth, and Ruth's loyalty makes a distinct shift. As the novel progressed, I began to increasingly grow suspicious of Ruth's narrative voice. In fact, near the conclusion of the story she says "I have never distinguished readily between thinking and dreaming," which seems indicative of an unreliable narrator. In addition, there is a scene in the woods with Sylvie that has a dreamlike and trippy quality to it that I mistrust as reality.

There's so much more I could say about this novel; it is rich in images and details, but I will refrain (but if I did it would include more discussion of Ruth's sense of intransience, the title's significance, the idea of preventing loss not from fear or care but just so something does not loom in one's mind as something tragically gone, the timeless quality of the narrative that does not specify dates, and what would be different if, say, Lucille had narrated this tale instead). Suffice it to say that I wish more that I read was this lyrically beautiful and narratively rich.

Stars: 4.5