Miss Royce - the home economics teacher at Ruth and Lucille's school. Lucille eventually moves in with her. Robinson's brooding first novel is perhaps fatally weighed down with excess myth-and-symbol pretensions, but it's often exhilaratingly imaginative—as narrator Ruth becomes a kind of spectral presence in the tale of her own childhood and early adolescence in a remote, flood-prone lakeside village in Idaho. The village is where Grandmother lives—the Grandmother who takes in little Ruth and sister Lucille when their mother abandons them, promises to return, then drives to her death in the lake: "She...broke the family and the sorrow was released...a thousand ways into the hills." But the family is held together for a while by Grandmother—whose husband also drowned in that lake when a fine fast train plunged off the bridge; whose three daughters all seemed to have flown off at one time; who cares for Ruth and Lucille well, as if "reliving a long day" with her own lamented daughters. And after Grandmother's death the girls are briefly tended by two aged, fearful relatives who gladly give them up to the care of Aunt Sylvie, one of Grandmother's missing daughters now miraculously returned. But Sylvie's a drifter attempting to housekeep—abstracted, gentle, given to wandering and eating meals in the dark—and Ruth is drawn to Sylvie's world of silences and quiet disappearances, with musings on the nature of loss when people perish and things remain: "The illusion of perimeters fails when families are separated." Lucille, on the other hand, maintains that "calm, horizontal look" of one who sees differences: she joins the "common persons" and leaves home. Finally, then, after Authorities plan to take Ruth away from her obviously unstable aunt, Ruth and Sylvie burn the house, hop the rails, and leave for a lifetime of wandering. A convoluted novel, obsessively striated with repetitive images of fluidity—flooding waters, blinking trains, the play of light and darkness, wisps of overheard tales—but if the poetry is over-stressed, the bottom-line talent in this highly promising debut is unmistakable.

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.” Although both girls find their aunt’s housekeeping eccentric, they view it in different ways. Eccentric housekeeping is manifested in Sylvie’s insisting that the family should eat in the dark. Ruth is the one to accept these odd habits of her aunt, but Lucille does not want to tolerate such behavior and, thus, begins to rebel. The girls avoid school for some time as the weather becomes warmer but eventually return to their studies. Lucille decides that the two of them should not be cloistered up and reaches out to other girls in the school. However, Ruth is left to herself – feeling alone and abandoned. Prolonged moments of Lucille’s absence are taking their toll on Sylvie that becomes more and more silent.Early in the book Ruthie’s and Lucille’s mother takes their next door neighbor’s …show more content… Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.” Robinson was the keynote speaker for the 75th anniversary celebration of the Iowa Writers' Workshop in June 2011, and she gave the 2012 Annual Buechner Lecture at The Buechner Institute at King University. On February 18, 2013, she was the speaker at the Easter Convocation of the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee and was awarded the degree of Doctor of Literature honoris causa. In 2012, Brown University awarded Robinson the degree of Doctor of Literature honoris causa. [20] The College of the Holy Cross, Notre Dame, Amherst College, Skidmore College, the University of Oxford, and Yale University have also awarded Robinson honorary degrees. She has been elected a fellow of Mansfield College, Oxford. [21] Commendations [ edit ]

DS: Was the line "Like a long legged fly upon the stream, his mind moves upon silence"—from Yeats's poem "Long-legged Fly"—in your mind when you were working on this novel? I don’t think it’s unusual for those who have experienced loss to engage in this kind of superstitious thinking, and I recognized this anxiety the first time I read Housekeeping. Fearing another abandonment, Ruth and Lucille watch Sylvie with keen attention for signs that she intends to leave, as if predicting this possibility would help them prepare for it: “Lucille and I still doubted that Sylvie would stay,” states Ruth. “She resembled our mother, and besides that, she seldom removed her coat, and every story she told had to do with a bus or a train station.” When I interviewed Marilynne Robinson at the Cambridge literary festival in November 2014, and asked her about the genesis of Housekeeping, her account was typically low-key and matter-of-fact, without any of the ostentation you might expect from the author of such an immense literary achievement. She had written the novel, in longhand, for her own pleasure, she said, without much thought about its afterlife, found it taken up by friends, then represented by the New York literary agent Ellen Levine, who sold it without delay to the famous American literary publishing house Farrar Straus and Giroux (which published it in the States in 1980), and in the UK to Faber.Robinson based elements of the novel on her own upbringing in Sandpoint, Idaho, including the setting of Fingerbone—an isolated place “chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere.” Its main feature is the lake, which is also the source of the family’s loss—it was into these waters that Ruth and Lucille’s mother sailed in her neighbor’s car and also where their grandfather, decades earlier, plunged to his death in an extraordinary train derailment. Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it,” writes Robinson, and like a wake in water, we follow after, telling ourselves stories to try and reclaim what we’ve lost.