Housekeeping

I picked up Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping after reading the discussion about it at the reading room blog of the new york times. I am finding it hard to concentrate on reading these days because of too many boring distractions (just real life intruding, nothing unusual). This one looked accessible and also from the description it looked like the kind of book I would like, so I picked it up.

The novel is narrated in first person by Ruth who is reminiscing about her childhood upbringing in a small town in American pacific northwest called "Fingerbrook". The town is surrounded by a lake and the way Robinson describes the lake (and the landscape in general) the whole thing becomes very mysterious and unreal (like the photograph on the cover). It may be also be because it is through Ruth's consciousness that we see all these details of everyday life in Fingerbrook. As it happens, Ruth's mother had committed suicide by driving her car off the cliff into the lake. Before that Ruth's (maternal) grandfather had died in a train accident in the same lake. The lake in the scheme of the story becomes a mythical and symbolic presence - representing some sort of unfathomable and mysterious darkness, enveloping the whole town. Ruth and her sister Lucille first come to live with their grandmother but when she also dies (this time it is of simple old age, no accident or suicide) they come under the protection of their aunt Sylvie, who is their mother's sister. She is actually the central character of the novel. Like Ruth she is emotionally damaged too - early experiences of loss and pain have made both of them detached from their surroundings and from the life itself and has made them "transient" (a word which Robinson uses in very interesting way). This tone of detachment comes off beautifully in the the voice in which Ruth narrates the story. It is only in the end we realize that it is the voice of a deeply troubled and unstable consciousness.

These days I am finding it hard to appreciate a book built around only "poetic" writing, the kind of writing which gets called "evocative". The whole book is written in purely descriptive manner. Ruth never tries to explain things to herself, and she never intellectualizes. It is not that I don't like this kind of writing at all, (these days) I just prefer some explicit discussion of ideas, ruminations about conceptual and abstract questions etc. I guess I should be reading philosophy and not fiction but towards the end there is a line which really struck me as something that showed the absence of theoretical explanations as intentional. Ruth says, "Fact explains nothing. On the contrary, it is fact that requires explanation." She is not using the facts of the story to generalize about some abstract idea but she is also not providing an explanation while admitting that an explanation is indeed required. There is something deeply religious about it, which is another subtle them that runs through the book. On the whole, it is definitely worth a look even though personally it passed me by without doing much.

An extract from the book I really liked:

"Of my conception I know only what you know of yours. It occurred in darkness and I was unconsenting. I (and that slenderest word is too gross for the rare thing I was then) walked forever through reachless oblivion, in the mood of one smelling night-blooming flowers, and suddenly - My ravishers left their traces in me, male and female, and over the months I rounded, grew heavy, until the scandal could no longer be concealed and oblivion expelled me. But this I have in common with all my kind. By some bleak alchemy what had been mere unbeing becomes death when life is mingled with it. So they seal the door against our returning."