*Housekeeping

Housekeeping -Marilynne Robinson
Here then, is the female sentence. Here then, is the female story arc. Without hesitation, but with complete, creeping patience, Robinson accepts her sentence, paddles once, and spinning into the middle of a deeply cold and sad lake, the story shows us the comedy and the slow despair of both abandonment and utter, resplendent, unique love. The details that Robinson chooses. The philosophy. The Biblical cry of Ruth and the song of Miriam and the religion of Cane. She doesn’t show us, the book is not written to be read, it is merely a testament and we stumble upon it, fortunate us, and gander as if it were a mountain suddenly in view, or a stunted tree in a blooming orchard, a helicopter low in the sky, a falling leaf in late August. But there is no sadness to be had for a mountain, or for a plant, or even for a helicopter. It is only curiosity. And somehow she makes me laugh, though I promise I never broke a smile while reading her book. She is obviously coeval with McCarthy. But I would never call her a sidekick. For they are both unique. Both, thank God, I believe, writing beyond gender. Though Cormac has his moments. Though Marilynne has her moments.
This is what I would call modern American fiction:
“That is to say that she conceived of life as a road down which one traveled, an easy enough road through a broad country, and that one’s destination was there from the very beginning, a measured distance away, standing in the ordinary light like some plain house where one went in and was greeted by respectable people and was shown to a room where everything one had ever lost or put aside was gathered together, waiting.”
This is what we might call post-luminescent:
“In the course of the days the flood had made a sort of tea of hemp and horsehair and rag paper in that room, a smell which always afterward clung to it and which I remember precisely at this minute, though I have never encountered its like.”
“What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?”
“If we imagine that Noah’s wife, when she was old, found somewhere a remnant of the Deluge, she might have walked into it till her widow’s dress floated above her head and the water loosened her plaited hair.”
“…so prophecy is only brilliant memory.”
“By some bleak alchemy what had been mere unbeing becomes death when life is mingled with it.”
She is a gem. A find. I am happy that, amazingly, again, this year, I find a find.