Marilynne Robinson

There is a balm in Gilead
To make the wounded whole;
There is a balm in Gilead
To heal the sin-sick soul.

After twenty years of estrangement and exile, Jack Boughton returns to his childhood home in Gilead, Iowa. Jack’s widowed father, a retired Presbyterian minister, is in failing health. Jack’s sister, Glory, the youngest of the eight Boughton siblings, has returned to the family home after a failed relationship. As the siblings care for their father’s needs, their kindred wounds and vulnerabilities form them into a unit apart.

Jack, and to a lesser extent Glory and their father, first appeared in Gilead in relation to his namesake, the Congregational minister John Ames. Home gives readers a different perspective on the fraught relationship between Jack and Reverend Ames.

I could point to Jack’s story as an explanation for why I am not a Calvinist. Reverend Boughton has worried about the state of Jack’s soul for his son’s entire life, and he holds out hope that Jack will accept God’s grace. He doesn’t see that Jack’s problem isn’t unbelief, but belief. Jack believes he is a reprobate and not one of God’s elect. He is unable to see himself as worthy of his family’s love. There isn’t a balm in Gilead for Jack Boughton.… (mais)

I've read two out of the four Gilead novels. The last one I read, Jack, I didn't like nearly as much as Gilead. So I thought I would try this earlier novel of Robinson's to see if it was her early writing that I liked. This book was more engaging than Jack was but still not up to the standards of Gilead.

The novel's main character is Ruth. She and her sister Lucille were brought to the small town of Fingerbone, on the edge of a largish lake, by their mother. She dropped them off at her mother's house, who wasn't home at the time, and then drove off. A few hours later she drove her car into the lake in what was probably suicide. The lake had also claimed the life of the girls' grandfather when the train on which he was crew went off the bridge across the lake with no survivors. The grandmother looked after the girls up until her death. Then two maiden great-aunts came to take over looking after them. They were completely unused to children and were consumed with nervousness. They contacted the girls' Aunt Sylvie who had been living a nomadic life around the western United States. When she finally turned up the great-aunts lost no time in fleeing the house and the children and the town. At first, Sylvie seemed like a much better choice but as the weeks and months went by, she proved that she had no aptitude for living in one place or looking after two young children. Ruth was quite taken with Sylvie but Lucille finally had enough and went to live with one of her teachers. Ruth and Sylvie kept living in the house but in no sense of the word did they "keep house". When Ruth started skipping school and spending more time with Sylvie, sometimes on the lake in a borrowed rowboat, it was obvious that the end of their living in Fingerbone was coming near. And so, one day, they hopped on a train and took off.

This was quite a sad book what with the child abandonment and failure to provide the necessities of life by all the adults in Ruth's life. Also, the men just seemed to have dropped out of existence which does happen but certainly impacts how children grow up.

I have to say that there were some wonderful passages in this book. Robinson is a fine writer, maybe even a gifted writer, but she will never be a favourite for me.… (mais)

I previously read Marilynne Robinson's four Gilead novels, and only now this Housekeeping, written 25 years earlier, and that may be the wrong order. I definitely recognized the very controlled, refined writing style; Robinson is a first-class craftswoman who writes heavily charged sentences in a misleadingly poetic upmake. And I also recognized the emphasis on sensorial introspection: just as in the Gilead novels, the main character (here Ruth Foster) constantly alternates between registering her own sensory experiences and reflecting on what that does to her, and on the things she struggles with. Here Robinson approaches what the 19th century naturalists and symbolists did, by focusing on the threat posed by the environment in which this story takes place: the remote, chilly village of Fingerbone (the name alone), on a large lake in Idaho, connected with the outside world by a railway bridge that runs over the water. The tone is set right from the start: Ruth tells how her grandfather died when a train derailed on the bridge, ended up in the lake and was never recovered (and neither the bodies of the passengers within). And less than 20 pages later we read how her own mother committed suicide by driving her car off a cliff into the lake. The 'gothic flavor' of this novel is also emphasized further on, including in an unparalleled nocturnal scene in which the house is half flooded; darkness and obscurity clearly are recurring themes in Robinson.
But the main body of this novel describes how Ruth, together with her sister Lucille, subsequently came under the care of her aunt Sylvie, a confused, chaotic and very dreamy character. Robinson writes quite emphatically: “it was the beginning of Sylvie's housekeeping”, and in doing so she immediately provides us with a key to reading this novel. After all, it is not only about the struggle to keep the house (literally), but also about keeping it 'in order', and by extension also one's own life. Looking back on it, you notice that all the characters in this novel struggle with this: getting a grip on their own lives, curbing the inherent chaos of life and steering it in the right direction, and what you have to give up and sacrifice in doing so, and whether such an orderly life is actually the right choice. And all that aggravated by the struggle with loss, grief, isolation and loneliness, especially as a woman or a girl.
In other words, through Ruth Foster's coming-of-age story, Robinson opens up a reflection on what this life is all about and whether it makes sense to control it. To be clear: she does not give simple, obvious answers, but above all - through Ruth - asks the right questions. And thus there is a link with the Gilead novels, which essentially deal with the same theme, but with a clear, more religious - read Calvinist - slant, in which the question of good and evil, damnation and grace are more central. I think that Robinson definitely shows even more mastery in some of those Gilead novels, both stylistically and substantively, but with this 'Housekeeping' she already showed that her novels are among the best of what has been written in recent decades, worldwide.… (mais)