Housekeeping Is a Keeper

*Warning: spoilers haunt this post like ghosts in an abandoned home*

Housekeeping is a novel that is every bit as unassuming as its main character and every bit as surprising.  It is a slender novel whose title itself makes no promises of adventure or excitement, but you do not have to spend much time reading Marilynne Robinson’s prose to know that something extraordinary is about to unfold before your eyes.  The novel takes place in the 1950s in the fictional town of Fingerbone, Idaho, a small town built on the edge of a large lake.  Our narrator, Ruth, is the granddaughter of the man who built the home at the center of the story.  That man worked for the railroad and died one night when the train he was on slid off the track while running over the long bridge that spans the lake and disappeared under the icy black waters.  Ruth and her sister, Lucille, spent their early years in Seattle, but when Ruth was seven, their mother borrowed a neighbor's car, drove to Fingerbone, left the two girls on her mother’s porch with a box of graham crackers, and drove her car into the lake.  Ruth and Lucille were raised by their grandmother for the next six years until she passed away in her own bed.  Their grandfather’s sisters traveled to Fingerbone to raise the girls, but they finally made contact with Ruth’s mother’s younger sister, Sylvie, to come and watch the girls.  Sylvie, 35 years old when she first appears in the novel, moves into the house and sets up housekeeping.

Housekeeping is poetry.  Robinson’s prose is some of the most beautiful that I have read since beginning this project.  It has the appearance of effortlessness, a powerful simplicity that is mesmerizing.  Even the most utilitarian of sentences are sculpted and polished.  For example

It is true that one is always aware of the lake in Fingerbone, or the deeps of the lake, the lightless, airless waters below.  When the ground is plowed in the spring, cut and laid open, what exhales from the furrows but the same, sharp, watery smell.  The wind is watery, and all the pumps and creeks and ditches smell of water unalloyed by any other element.  At the foundation is the old lake, which is smothered and nameless and altogether black.

Without restricting her vocabulary as Hemingway and his followers do, she strives for the same starkness and power, turning every observation or statement into a thing of beauty.  And when she moves beyond the bounds of physical description to describe emotional and philosophical truths, she constructs still more gorgeous sentences.  Here is but one sample:

But she left us and broke the family and the sorrow was released and we saw its wings and saw it fly a thousand ways into the hills, and sometimes I think sorrow is a predatory thing because birds scream at dawn with a marvelous terror, and there is, as I have said before, a deathly bitterness in the smell of ponds and ditches.

I could essentially quote the entirety of the novel because it seems as though not a single sentence is amiss.  Housekeeping is poetry masquerading as prose.

Housekeeping is philosophy.  Beautiful sentences would mean nothing if they had nothing to say.  Robinson’s novel is an intense meditation on the nature of existence, how the physical world interacts with our thoughts and dreams, how memory and longing penetrate reality, and how loneliness settles over it all.  In contemplating the lake that has swallowed up lives (and the biblical flood before it that swallowed up lives on a much grander scale), Ruth, our narrator, observes that “it seemed to me that what perished need not also be lost,” and that Sylvie, her aunt and guardian, “felt the life of perished things.”  Things that disappear are simultaneously lost to us and persist in their own right and in our memory.  It is the complicated and beautiful relationship between thoughts and objects that Ruthie struggles with in this unusual coming-of-age story: 

What is thought, after all, what is dreaming, but swim and flow, and the images they seem to animate?  The images are the worst of it.  It would be terrible to stand outside in the dark and watch a woman in a lighted room studying her face in a window, and to throw a stone at her, shattering the glass, and then to watch the window knit itself up again and the bright bits of lip and throat and hair piece themselves seamlessly again into that unknown, indifferent woman.  It would be terrible to see a shattered mirror heal to show a dreaming woman tucking up her hair.  And here we find our great affinity with water, for like reflections on water our thoughts will suffer no changing shock, no permanent displacement.

Our thoughts are the lapping waters upon which the physical objects of the world seem to be animated, and our thoughts, no matter how disturbed, will return to their original shape and reflection.  That which seems most transient is most permanent; that which seems to have perished is still alive.  Ruthie, built like her aunt and her mother, and their mother before them, is making a journey that Sylvie has already made and is becoming a woman in her family’s image.  Lucille, Ruth’s sister, has resisted this growth and decided to be “normal,” but Ruthie doesn’t seem to have that choice.  And whether Ruth’s move is toward madness or a step toward enlightenment is unknown, and part of the power of the novel.  Whether Ruth’s story is tragic or triumphant is entirely unsettled by the novel.  Ruth finds a Zen existence at the end of her journey in the novel, letting go of the physical world of need, as she says,

I learned an important thing in the orchard that night, which was that if you do not resist the cold, but simply relax and accept it, you no longer feel the cold as discomfort.  . . . I could feel that I was breaking the tethers of need one by one.

Ruth finds further relationships between the craving for something and the gaining of that desire:   

For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. 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 savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is foreshadowing--the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries.

There are enough contemplations about reality and our relationship to reality in this novel to create a philosophical text, but Robinson utilizes the power of fiction, a compelling handful of characters, and sublimely gorgeous prose to make us engage emotionally and spiritually rather than just intellectually, like a parable or an ancient koan.

Housekeeping is magic.  I have only scratched the surface of this rich novel.  There are numerous discussions to be had about religion, gender, and so much more.  Everything comes together in this slim volume and slides into your thoughts and perceptions of the world we live in.  Ruthie and Sylvie are so beautifully delineated, so odd and fragile and impenetrable and unbreakable.  Robinson takes us on Ruth’s journey and holds our hearts and minds in her hands.  This is one of the best novels I have read and one that will stay with me for a long time.   

The Fantastic World of Midnight's Children

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is a fascinating and beautifully written novel.  The narrator, Saleem Sinai, was born at midnight of August 15, 1947, at the very instant that India gained its independence from the United Kingdom.  Saleem sees his life as intimately bound up with the life of his mother country.  In fact, he sees his life as intimately bound up with the lives of everyone around him or even tangentially near him.  In the opening of the novel, as Saleem is racing to tell the story of his life, he says:   

And there are so many stories to tell, too many, such an excess of intertwined lives events miracles places rumors, so dense a commingling of the improbable and the mundane!  I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you’ll have to swallow the lot as well.

And Saleem delivers on that promise, presenting the reader with a stream of stories from the thirty years preceding his birth to the thirty years following his birth.

Saleem’s tale is a delicious combination of historical fact and magical fantasy, falling into the loose genre of magical realism.  On the one hand, the events surrounding Saleem are historical events.  We travel from Gandhi’s hunger strikes to India’s independence, from India’s war with China over the Himalayan boundary to its war with Pakistan, from the liberation of Bangladesh to the Indian Emergency under Indira Gandhi.  In many ways, the novel is an overview of the birth of India and it first tumultuous thirty years.  But Midnight’s Children is not an Indian Forrest Gump, in which Saleem reveals how he is central to all the important historical and cultural moments of Indian life.  While Saleem is indeed present for a lot of events, he is much more interested in the metaphorical connections between him and his country.  His sicknesses are India’s sicknesses and his triumphs and missteps match the country’s.  Because, on the other hand (to pick up my syntactical structure from long ago), Saleem’s adventures are as fantastic as they are historic.  Saleem, and all the other children born in the midnight hour of India’s Independence Day, has super powers.  Saleem can read minds while others are able to change their physical form, transmute metal into gold, travel through time, and so on.  Even when Saleem loses his psychic powers he has a super human sense of smell, smelling not only physical odors but the scents of fear, pride, sorrow and all the other emotions.  Even those without powers can affect the world in fantastic ways.  The women around Saleem infuse the food they cook and the clothes they make with their emotions, feeding and clothing others with envy, bitterness, and secret pain.  The effect of these departures from realism is magical and gripping.  Like the stories of other first-person narrators, Saleem’s stories are about more than their content and their facts.  Unlike other first-person narrators, Saleem’s reliability is not called into question—we aren’t trying to parse out what is real and what is not.  We are asked merely to consider the connections mapped out by Saleem between an individual and the world from which she has sprung.

Midnight’s Children is ambitious and funny, thoughtful and moving.  Like so many other beautiful novels, it effortlessly combines the high and the low, the intellect and the gut, making its reader laugh and think long after the last page has been read.

Falconer Is . . . Good

One of the things that I have loved about this reading project is that I know that every book I pick up is going to be a thrill in some way.  Even when I read a book I don’t particularly enjoy, like Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, for example, there is always something there for me to admire about the prose, the depiction of characters, or the narrative structure.  If I am going to invest a dozen and more hours reading a book, I’d prefer to enjoy myself and read something rewarding.  Additionally, I’d rather sing a book’s praises than play the critic and suggest its shortcomings.  When reading a renowned book, I can start from the premise that the author told the story that she wanted to tell in the way that she wanted to tell it, that each decision was a purposeful one.

I was very excited to pick up John Cheever’s Falconer as the next book on my list.  I am familiar with Cheever’s name but have never read anything by him before, and I was entirely unfamiliar with Falconer.  I was immediately taken in: the novel begins with Farragut, a 48 year old professor from New England arriving at the gates of Falconer Correctional Facility, having been convicted for murdering his only brother.  He is put in cellblock F and we meet his fellow inmates and the wardens who guard them.  The writing is enjoyable and the characters are interesting, and Farragut is a great main character, an educated well-to-do man who is an opiate addict and a convicted murderer, though he claims that wailing on his brother with a fire iron was an “accident.”

But beyond these interesting elements, the story as a whole failed to resonate with me, and the cumulative punch of the narrative is sadly lost on me.  The novel reads more like a handful of short stories set in the prison with the same characters, or like a set of episodes in a television series.  One chapter is devoted to Farragut’s opiate addiction, another to his and other’s homosexual encounters in the prison, and another to a possible prison riot for the prisoners to seize control of the jailhouse.  So the novel has something to say about addiction and something to say about male relationships and bisexuality and love and something to say about power and the control of one set of people by another or by the state, but there does not, for me at least, seem to be anything unifying or awe-inspiring in the novel as a whole.

My general and vague disappointment is countered by the statements on the covers of my Vintage edition.  In the blurb on the back, I am told that Falconer is “Stunning and brutally powerful,” that it “tells the story of a man named Farragut, his crime and punishment, and his struggle to remain a man in a universe bent on beating him back to childhood.”   I definitely don’t see this as a narrative about the abuses of state power and the attempt to crush the humanity or manhood out of prisoners.  It is no Orange is the New Black, shining a light into prison culture and validating the status of prisoners as human beings.  Then a quote from Saul Bellow tells me that he feels the book is “indispensable, if you earnestly desire to know what is happening to the human soul in the U.S.A.”  Wow!  That is some serious stuff right there, but if Cheever is meditating on the human soul in America, I am missing it.  Finally, the cover quotes the New York Times, informing me that Falconer is “One of the most important novels of our time,” and urges me to “Read it and be ennobled.”  Again with the wow and the serious stuff!  I want to be ennobled by a great work of literature, but this was not the book to do it for me.

As I indicated in my opening paragraph, I trust that Cheever wrote exactly the book that he wanted to, so I do not fault him or his novel for my experience with Falconer.  Clearly, I am out of sync with Cheever and those who find this book to be overflowing with profundity and insight into the heart of humanity.  And that’s okay.  As I said in my post about Doctorow’s Ragtime, sometime a book just speaks to you; the flipside of course is that sometimes it doesn’t.  To those of you who share the same philosophical pitch with Cheever, you will undoubtedly find yourself vibrating sympathetically and seeing what I saw as merely clever and strong writing as profound and moving and hilariously brilliant.  I envy you your experience.  If you don’t know if Cheever is your man, reading Falconer would be a good way to find out.  The book is not overly long, and even if you don’t feel yourself ennobled by the experience, you should at least have a good time immersing yourself in his world.