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A modern classic, Housekeeping
is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who
grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent
grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and
finally of Sylvie, their eccentric and remote aunt. The family
house is in the small Far West town of Fingerbone set on a
glacial lake, the same lake where their grandfather died in
a spectacular train wreck, and their mother drove off a cliff
to her death. It is a town “chastened by an outsized
landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by
an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred
elsewhere.” Ruth and Lucille’s struggle toward
adulthood beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival,
and the dangerous and deep undertow of transience.
MARILYNNE ROBINSON is the author
of the novel Gilead and two books of nonfiction,
Mother Country and The Death of Adam. She
teaches at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. |
