In the words of an early New York Times review, this novel is “about people who have not managed to connect with a place, a purpose, a routine or another person. The townspeople, who cannot understand the idea of self-sufficient “homeless” women, decide Ruth and Sylvie are insane and that they must have drowned in the lake. So, rather than submit to yet another assault on their strange and transient association, Ruth and Sylvie burn down their house and escape together across the lake. Curse and expel them, send their children wandering, drown them in floods and fires, and old women will make songs of all these sorrows and sit on the porch and sing them on mild evenings.” She writes: “Families will not be broken. Sylvie’s guardianship is challenged with the threat that she and Ruth should be separated. Ruth, a natural rebel, goes deeper into her family’s dark past the more conventional Lucille moves away. In an echo of Robinson’s own divided nature, the Stone sisters, inseparable in childhood, begin to grow apart. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.”īy contrast, Lucille wants to escape Sylvie’s spell. Ruth, our narrator, is at home with her aunt’s transient spirit, and comfortable with solitude: “Once alone,” she says, “it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. It seemed to me that if she could remain transient here, she would not have to leave.” Sylvie, who is like a “mermaid in a ship’s cabin”, wanders by the lake while the family house goes to pieces. Ruth says: “I was reassured by her sleeping on the lawn, and now and then in the car. Sylvie commits to staying in Fingerbone to “keep house” for her nieces, though neither believes she will stay with them for long. These abandoned girls are raised by a succession of relatives, and finally their aunt Sylvie, a strange drifter who becomes the novel’s compelling central character. Housekeeping is the story of two orphans, Ruth and her sister Lucille Stone, living in remote Idaho by the lakeside town of Fingerbone. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.” There’s no one else in America today writing with such natural inner music. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savours of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing – the world will be made whole. In the simple spirit of these masters, Robinson’s prose, replete with metaphor and simile, is achingly quotable: “To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow.
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