"Weber fire"

Book: "Housekeeping" by Marilynne Robinson
Review: 3 bill-stars (out of 5)... good

This is the same girl who wrote "Gilead".
I like "Gilead" better, but "Housekeeping" is worthy.

I like Miz Robinson's slow, slow style. Her writing style is very smooth, readable, and wonderful. Both her books have had strong endings. That's rare. I also like that her books have "smack you in the face" themes.

"Housekeeping" isn't as interesting as "Gilead". "Gilead" was hoisted on the shoulders of following the old man through all his questioning and self-doubt and whatever. "Housekeeping" follows a teen-age girl through her trials and tribulations, which just isn't as compelling. The description of the town and neighbors was (I think) intentionally barren to make the girls seem more isolated. Well, that's OK, but it hurt my interest in the book.

There's a wonderful theme in parts of the book about the importance of things we don't see or don't know in everyday things or relationships. You look at someone and what they have done or achieved, but you don't see the things, good and bad, that they did not do. It's sort of like understanding how negative space can dominate a photograph. What's not there, not present is more important than what's there.

The gripping and beautiful example of this in the book is the suicide of the girls' mother. The girls wonders if her mother had not gone through with her suicide, then the young girl would never know it, never know the struggle won by not doing something. Here's a (long) QOTD that really captured this for me.

QOTD
"I remember her, grave with the peace of the destined, the summoned, and she seems almost an apparition.

But if she had simply brought us home again to the high frame apartment building with the scaffolding of stairs, I would not remember her that way.

Her eccentricities might have irked and embarrassed us when we grew older. We might have forgotten her birthday, and teased her to buy a car or to change her hair. We would have left her finally. We would have laughed together with bitterness and satisfaction at our strangely solitary childhood, in light of which our failings would seem inevitable, and all our attainments miraculous.

Then we would telephone her out of guilt and nostalgia, and laugh bitterly afterward because she asked us nothing, and told us nothing, and fell silent from time to time, and was glad to get off the phone. We would take her to a restaurant and a movie on Thanksgiving and buy her best-sellers for Christmas. We would try to give her outings and make her find some interests, but she would soften and shrink in our hands, and become infirm. She would bear her infirmities with the same taut patience with which she bore our solicitude, and with which she had borne every other aspect of life, and her silence would make us more and more furious."

- Ruthie, first person in "Housekeeping"
Strong.
peace... yow, bill

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