Published 1980 / Length 224 pages
In this lyrical first novel, desolation haunts the lakes, mountains and forests of north-west America’s ‘outsized landscape’. Fingerbone, Idaho is the atmospheric fictional town at the heart of the story, reflecting the author’s passion for the natural world. It is here that the narrator Ruth and her younger sister Lucille are abandoned by their mother, who leaves them at their grandmother’s house before driving to the lake where her own father drowned. So begins a series of movingly described losses that fill the novel. Robinson portrays contrasting approaches to housekeeping, from the meticulous grandmother to the eccentric aunt, Sylvie. The girls must decide whether to break free from Sylvie’s eccentricities and follow convention or pursue a nomadic existence, atypical for women. Housekeeping is not only about keeping physical surfaces clean, but also about the depths: how best to tend the spiritual home. This is a novel about the possibilities of survival and self-sufficiency; about the transience of all things, even those we most love.
‘Marilynne Robinson has written a first novel that one reads as slowly as poetry – and for the same reason: the language is so precise, so distilled, so beautiful that one doesn’t want to miss any pleasure it might yield up to patience.’ – The New York Times
• The characters approach housekeeping in different ways: what is the wider significance of the varying manners in which they look after their homes?
• The lake is in one sense a symbol of death. In the novel, is the natural environment something to be feared entirely? What other effects does the author achieve through her depiction of the natural world?
• The book presents three generations of women: the grandmother, aunts and nieces. How are their attitudes similar and different?
• What roles do men play in this novel?
• To what extent, if any, do you think Robinson is making a feminist statement?
• The novel was awarded the 1981 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for Best First Novel and nominated for the 1982 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, which Robinson won with her second book, Gilead, in 2005.
• A film version of Housekeeping was released in 1987, shot in and around British Columbia, directed by Bill Forsyth.
• In 2003, The Observer named Housekeeping as one of the 100 greatest novels of all time.
• The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought by MARILYNNE ROBINSON – this critically acclaimed essay collection examines many of the same themes as Housekeeping, including wilderness and civilization.
• Gilead by MARILYNNE ROBINSON – the author’s Pulitzer Prize-winning second novel contains her familiar concerns of mortality, religion and the gulf between generations.
• Beloved by TONI MORRISON (see here) – written in a similarly intense lyrical style, Morrison’s masterpiece explores fraught family relationships.