Housekeeping

(See a post and interesting comments on another book by Marilynne Robinson here.)

When you read delightful writing by a somewhat neglected and very unconventionally-raised child narrator, you wonder if it’s fair to enjoy it. You can’t help feeling guilty as you laugh at the absurdities.

There were now many of these cans on the counters and the windowsill, and they would have covered the table long since if Lucille and I had not removed them now and then. We did not object to them, despite the nuisance, because they looked very bright and sound and orderly, especially since Sylvie arranged them open end down, except for the ones she used to store peach pits and the keys from sardine and coffee cans. Frankly we had come to the point where we could hardly object to order in any form, though we hoped that her interest in bottles was a temporary aberration.

Ruth is a strange narrator. She usually seems unbelievably detached, but sometimes she seems so hopeful it hurts:

There would be a general reclaiming of fallen buttons and misplaced spectacles, of neighbors and kin, till time and error and accident were undone, and the world became comprehensible and whole....For why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of a hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old that our thoughts have abandoned other business? What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?

It’s not exactly a gripping plot, but I found myself reading just to see what she would say next. The book is absolutely beautiful. I would highly recommend it if you can handle such beauty along with some disturbing yuckiness (I don’t mean anything graphic or violent. It’s hard to explain. It’s more of a philosophical uneasiness). But that seems to be the problem with beauty in this world in any case, doesn’t it?