The Sheriff of Fingerbone - an older man (he is a grandfather) who has served as the town sheriff for decades. Although he has dealt with many murders and other violent crimes, he is uncertain how to deal with Sylvie's apparent neglect of Ruth and Lucille. Eventually he informs Sylvie that there will be a hearing regarding Ruth's future. All of the events take place in the house that was built by their grandfather, Edmund Foster. The man worked for the railroad and lived happily, but his life ended in a train derailment that took place on the bridge over the large glacial lake near Fingerbone. The orphans’ mother and aunts took different paths after they were raised in this house. Marilynne Robinson wins Library of Congress fiction prize". Associated Press. March 29, 2016 . Retrieved March 29, 2016. What Does It Mean to Love a Country? (online: Don't Give Up on America)". The New York Times. October 9, 2020.

The influence of Robinson’s Calvinism on her work has been widely noted, and while some have argued that the emphasis on resurrection in such passages of Housekeeping reveal a compulsion towards the Christian afterlife, she has resisted being labeled as a “religious writer.” This might be because her beliefs preclude such easy categorization. As Mark O’Connell wrote in the New Yorker, “Her spiritual sensibility is richly inclusive and non-dogmatic. There’s little talk about sin or damnation in her writing, but a lot about forgiveness and tolerance and kindness.” Sylvie, as it turns out, is an avowed nonconformist with an unconventional lifestyle and unique view of the world. Her permissive parenting evolves into the enabling of an alternative existence for her nieces. This new freedom includes skipping school, stealing boats, riding the rails, and other risky, unstructured behavioral acts which are particularly outré when performed by young women in the conservative 1950s.As I grow older, I notice both a fear and desire to relive aspects of my parent’s story, especially as I consider the possibility of motherhood myself. I am often haunted by certain parallels—my mother had been nineteen when she met my father, the same age I was when I started seeing the boy who would become the man I would marry. I was twenty-five on my wedding day; my mother had been twenty-four on hers. Repetition might be another spell of sorts, a way to retrace our steps, reverse time and undo the damage that was done if we could only figure out where it all went wrong. This is some fancy hifalutin chat coming from such a callow youngster. And it never stops. Here she is thinking about her mother and her aunt (thinking about the mother and the aunt accounts for around 88% of Ruthie’s thoughts, with another 12% spent on her sister. She’s the only teenage girl ever who didn’t once think about pop music.) : Robinson was born Marilynne Summers on November 26, 1943, in Sandpoint, Idaho, the daughter of Eileen (Harris) and John J. Summers, a lumber company employee. [6] [7] [8] Her brother is the art historian David Summers, who dedicated his book Vision, Reflection, and Desire in Western Painting to her. She did her undergraduate work at Pembroke College, the former women's college at Brown University, receiving her Bachelor of Arts degree magna cum laude in 1966, and being elected to Phi Beta Kappa. At Brown, one of her teachers was the postmodern novelist John Hawkes. [9] She received her Doctor of Philosophy degree in English from the University of Washington in 1977. [10] [11] Writing career [ edit ]

Robinson has been a member of her church for almost as long as she’s lived in Iowa. She can regularly be found arranging the flowers in the sanctuary, socializing during coffee hour, and bowing her head during the Prayers of the People. Occasionally, she has preached exegetically rich sermons on, among other things, economics, scriptural language, and grace. Those sermons are sometimes disarmingly personal. “I have never been much good at the things most people do,” she confesses in one of them, before describing the single day she spent as a waitress—a spectacular failure, in which she spilled soup on a customer and was banished to the kitchen, where an older waitress, taking pity on her, tried to give her that day’s tips. Robinson likens the waitress’s offer to the widow’s mite, in the Gospels: “a gift made freely, in contempt of circumstance.” Yet she felt that she could not accept it, and struggles still with the question of whether she should have done so. She credits the waitress with teaching her that generosity is “a casting off of the constraints of prudence and self-interest.” In that respect, she notes, it “is so like an art that I think it may actually be the impulse behind art.” The flood that invades the city adds up to this feeling of loneliness that both Ruth and Lucille are already experiencing. In the world of Housekeeping, this flood is not just an ordinary one. Rather, it is a metaphor for the forces that prevent the girls from becoming one with the society and their relatives. It becomes progressively hard to cope with a lonely existence that the girls are succumbed to, and both girls find their own ways to deal with this problem. Molly Foster – the oldest of the three Foster sisters, who leaves Fingerbone to do missionary work as a bookkeeper in "Honan Province" in China. What she, modestly, did not say to me was that, unknown as she was, an early rave review in the New York Times ensured that the book would be noticed. “Here’s a first novel that sounds as if the author has been treasuring it up all her life, waiting for it to form itself,” began the critic, Anatole Broyard. “It’s as if, in writing it, she broke through the ordinary human condition with all its dissatisfactions, and achieved a kind of transfiguration. You can feel in the book a gathering voluptuous release of confidence, a delighted surprise at the unexpected capacities of language, a close, careful fondness for people that we thought only saints felt.” Broyard’s awed enthusiasm was soon echoed by many critics and readers. Sylvia continues to live in her Fingerbone house, with no thought of flight after her husband's death. She raises her children Molly, Helen, and Sylvie with neither complaint nor affection, the same way she cares for Helen's daughters, Ruthie and Lucille, until her own lonely death at 76.Max, D. T. (2012-09-07). "D.F.W. Week: The Wonderfully Arrogant First Pitch Letter". The New Yorker. ISSN 0028-792X . Retrieved 2019-04-02.

To see what we’ve loved and lost returned to us, for wounds to be healed, and families be made whole—I don’t need to believe in an image of the Christian afterlife to recognize that desire is a true one. To be in the presence of what has vanished, to briefly brush hands with it again—maybe some would call that heaven, but when I read those passages about ascension and restitution, I see them more as a metaphor for memory, which might offer something close to a secular resurrection.Man Booker International Prize 2013 Finalists Announced | The Man Booker Prizes". Themanbookerprize.com. 2013-01-24. Archived from the original on 2015-09-24 . Retrieved 2015-10-29. By contrast, Lucille wants to escape Sylvie’s spell. In an echo of Robinson’s own divided nature, the Stone sisters, inseparable in childhood, begin to grow apart. Ruth, a natural rebel, goes deeper into her family’s dark past; the more conventional Lucille moves away. Then the Fingerbone community steps in. Sylvie’s guardianship is challenged with the threat that she and Ruth should be separated. Robinson believes in family. She writes: “Families will not be broken. Curse and expel them, send their children wandering, drown them in floods and fires, and old women will make songs of all these sorrows and sit on the porch and sing them on mild evenings.”