Housekeeping (novel)

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Housekeeping
HousekeepingNovel.JPG
First edition cover
Author Marilynne Robinson
LanguageEnglish
Published1980 Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication placeUnited States
Media typePrint (hard & paperback)
Pages219 pp
ISBN 0-374-17313-3
OCLC 6602826
813/.54 19
LC Class PS3568.O3125 H6 1980

Housekeeping is a 1980 novel by Marilynne Robinson. The novel was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and awarded the PEN/Hemingway Award for best first novel.

Contents

In 2003, Guardian Unlimited named Housekeeping one of the 100 greatest novels of all time, [1] describing the book as "Haunting, poetic story, drowned in water and light, about three generations of women." Time magazine also included the novel in its Time 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. [2]

Plot

Ruthie narrates the story of how she and her younger sister Lucille are raised by a succession of relatives in the fictional town of Fingerbone, Idaho, after their mother Helen Stone leaves them with her mother Sylvie Foster and then commits suicide. Early in the novel a passenger train plunges from a trestle bridge into a lake.

Fingerbone somewhat resembles Robinson's hometown, Sandpoint, Idaho, particularly the presence of a major rail bridge, which crosses Lake Pend Oreille, and has direct rail links to Spokane and Montana. The lake is Idaho's largest, 43-mile-long (69-kilometer), and Sandpoint lies on the lake's shore, as does Fingerbone.

The two children are first raised by their grandmother Sylvie Foster and then by her sisters-in-law's Lily and Nona Foster. Eventually their aunt Sylvie Fisher, who has been living as a transient, comes to take care of them. At first the three are a close-knit group, but as Lucille grows up she comes to dislike their eccentric life-style and moves out to live with Miss Royce, her home economics teacher. When Ruthie's well-being is questioned by the courts, Sylvie returns to life on the road and takes Ruthie with her.

The novel treats the subject of housekeeping, not only in the domestic sense of cleaning, but in the larger sense of keeping a spiritual home for one's self and family in the face of loss, for the girls experience a series of abandonments.

The novel is narrated by Ruth from the perspective of the transparent eyeball. This narration style was used by the transcendentalist authors who influenced Robinson, including Ralph Waldo Emerson. [3]

Time period

Although no dates are specified, the novel likely takes place in the 1950s: Ruthie reads the novel Not as a Stranger , a bestseller from 1954; and Sylvie's husband "fought in the Pacific." Like Ruthie and Lucille, Robinson (born in 1943) was an adolescent in the late 1950s.

Presumably, the three Foster sisters were born in the late 1910s (as Sylvie is in her mid-thirties when the main plot begins) and the train accident occurred around 1930 (as the three sisters were in their early teens at that time). The train accident in the novel bears many similarities to the Custer Creek train wreck of 1938, in which a passenger train derailed from a bridge into a creek in Montana (the state that borders Idaho), killing 47 people. It remains Montana's worst-ever rail disaster.

Characters

Foster family: Younger generation

Foster family: Middle generation

Foster family: Older generation

Other characters

Film adaptation

The film adaptation Housekeeping was released in 1987. It stars Christine Lahti and was directed by Bill Forsyth. The film was shot in and around Nelson, British Columbia.

References

  1. Robert McCrum (October 12, 2003). "The 100 greatest novels of all time: The list". Guardian Unlimited . London.
  2. "All Time 100 Novels". Time . October 16, 2005. Archived from the original on October 19, 2005. Retrieved May 4, 2010.
  3. Fay, Sarah (Fall 2008). "Marilynne Robinson, The Art of Fiction No. 198". The Paris Review (186). Retrieved June 16, 2021.