Housekeeping~Marilynne Robinson

The chapter when their house floods is pretty impressive. I also enjoyed the bit involving the mother, a car and a cliff.

Was looking for a thread about Gilead, but there doesn't seem to be one? In any case, I just found out about this:

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6495098.html?nid=3323

I can't help feeling that it's going to be a disappointment, but on the other hand, I imagine I'll be buying it as soon as it's out.

her essay/speech in harper's this month is EXCELLENT! i read it out loud outside in the sun yesterday. my kids weren't impressed, but i was!

So - has anyone else read "Home"? I just finished it, and was pretty amazed.

Gilead was lovely. I need to take a look at Home. Robinson is for me sort of one line of connection between classical literature and fc2 type stuff.

I struggled for a month or two to make it through the first chapter of this book, then sat down last night and read the whole thing. What an amazing writer. So good.

So she was on The Daily Show last night?

she was? she has a new book out, something to do with positivism and faith as world views.

just finished this and it's pretty wonderful, although I'm not completely sold on the character of Sophie.

Sylvie -- why not?

well she was this kind of a priori paragon of free-spirited feminine existence. she seemed to exist mainly for the purpose of being contrasted against. just a piston in the narrative's engine without any real force of its own.

(also, is she supposed to be an homage to plath?)

Doesn't seem much like what I know of Plath...

But there WERE free-spirited women before feminism.

hah don't get it twisted, I'm not critiquing feminism itself, just that sylvie the character seemed opaque (and robinson probably meant it to be that way) but it was in a way that I found unsatisfying

There are free-spirited women NOW who exist outside the straightjacket of orthodox modern feminism (not to start trouble or anything).

Morbs, you should read Gilead. Very different from Housekeeping, and an unforced masterpiece.

amen to that.

she did it to me again, broke my heart with "Home".

I wasn't as moved as I was by Gilead, but I haven't read two more finely wrought novels in recent years.

Yeah I found it harder to get into and harder to love, but it was still masterful. I will try Housekeeping next. Her recent essays/lectures though, are bobbins.

***SPOLIERS***

seriously don't read this if you plan to read the book.

when the event happens at the end of the novel it took my breath away, and i mean that quite literally. when i read the sentence describing D and her son in the car driving towards the house the shock produced a gasp and a sob that it took a few minutes for me to compose myself from before i read on. It's all the more affecting because of the way it's so deftly and quietly described; when you are a few pages from the end and you expect the thing to just ebb into silence. it was all tears for me from that point on. Did either of you anticipate it?

I didn't, but I didn't find it that affecting either, I'm afraid. I think my problem with Home was one of sympathy and empathy. I could empathise with Glory, really understand the whys and wherefores of every issue she had - but still she seemed to me to be overthinking, obsessing over trivialities. I had trouble sympathising - in contrast to Ames in Gilead, who I thought brought just the right amount of thought to bear on each of his worries. As for Jack, of course I could sympathise, but empathy was completely lacking - perhaps understandably for such a black sheep, even one trying to make good.

i can understand that. Maybe MR goes just too far in terms of Glory's reticence in relating her concerns. There's so much absent or merely suggested in the book, some of which is actually in Gilead, that perhaps a bit more of her inner monologue is needed to ground the thing.

i mean~GODDAMN

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. Lucille and I would see each other often, and almost never talk of other things. Nothing would be more familiar to us than her silence, and her sad, abstracted calm. I know how it would have been, because I have observed that, in the way people are strange, they grow stranger. We would have laughed and felt abandoned and aggrieved, never knowing that she had gone all the way to the edge of the lake to rest her head and close her eyes, and had come back again for our sakes. She would have remained untransfigured. We would never have known that her calm was as slight as the skin on water, and that her calm sustained her as a coin can float on still water. We would have known nothing of the nature and reach of her sorrow if she had come back. But she left us and broke the family and the sorrow was released and we saw its wings and saw it fly a thousand ways into the hills, and sometimes I think sorrow is a predatory thing because birds scream at dawn with a marvelous terror, and there is, as I have said before, a deathly bitterness in the smell of ponds and ditches. When we were children and frightened of the dark, my grandmother used to say if we kept our eyes closed we would not see it. That was when I noticed the correspondence between the space within the circle of my skull and the space around me. I saw just the same figure against the lid of my eye or the wall of my room, or in the trees beyond my window. Even the illusion of perimeters fails when families are separated.

Chat with Obama:

http://www2.nybooks.com/articles/s3/2015/nov/05/president-obama-marilynne-robinson-conversation.html

Just finished this. A rum one. When it proceeds with action and dialogue it's so successful and evocative, with such a sly economy of emotive language, but too often I also felt myself wading through the many, often contrived, and often infuriating reflections of the narrator. If you went through this novel and took out every single single it would be so very improved. It tries to tell, so copiously, when it achieves everything it needs to through showing. I suppose this is a commonplace pitfall of debut novels; I'm told the Gilead uses the hokey-simile voice as well, but much more appropriately

Every single simile, even. Some of them work, but to be safer they all need to go

Bookkeeping

I suppose there's an argument that the unrestrained figurative tower is redolent of the unrestrainedly Other lifestyle our heroines fall into

I didn't really get on with Housekeeping, possibly for similar reasons; as for Gilead I can't recall how simile prone the immensely likeable narrator is but concur with Alfred above that it is very different from Housekeeping, and an unforced masterpiece.

I said that, eh?

40 pages into Gilead. This is the most any writer's prose style has improved between their first and second novels, ever

Glad you're enjoying it---I've read the four follow-ups as well, with Jack's 2020 publication encouraging my greed for just one more, despite the author's age and how far she's taken the cycle---I won't say who I'd like to be the central character of the next one, since you haven't heard about (x) yet---despite my being not even an atheist, no more than a dog or a cabbage is, I got hooked on Gilead, and MR's great subject as an Xtian novelist and artist period, has to do with many the toils and snares of faith, Religion, the human mind (re xpost Glory overthinking etc) as part of life---she's next to Graham Greene in that, maybe more consistent, less (or not at all?) the tricky yarnspinner with it.

Also coping with the weird American historical thickets that you gradually become aware of being in, greater and lesser awareness and pressure of that at different times.

(relatable)

But still need to read Housekeeping (kind of remember the movie, at least that Margot Kidder seemed good in it)

Sorry! Actually *three* follow-ups, not four: Home, Lila, and Jack.

Well, I picked up Home at the same time as Gilead, so that'll follow. Housekeeping annoyed me (see upthread) but in a way that made me interested to read more of the author, and this one is as I'd hoped a full embrace of formerly evident strengths with none of the weaknesses even detectable. Could change - I've only just begun it - but I suspect it won't

Jack's the weakest, most strained of the bunch.

If you haven't watched Bill Forsythe's adaptation of Housekeeping, waste not ime.

I didn't know about Jack (the book)!

One thing I got from Gilead, as an atheist, was the value and efficacy of prayer. Not as a means to divine intervention, obviously, but as a way of meditating on a problem.

Yeah, and she (Rev. John's creator) gives him opportunities for that---I really enjoyed Jack shuffling, turning around in St. Louis, Memphis, Chicago, and Gilead's still on the map.

was not expecting an extended comic setpiece about the underground railroad, this book continues to amaze

In Gilead? Can't say I remember that bit.

(And I've read it maybe three times)

Housekeeping.

the horse/tunnel bit!

something about this from Home really struck me~

They had a horse once, mottled white with a grayish face and stockings. They called him Snowflake for a dingy splat of near-white on his brow. He was docile when her father bought him for the first two of his children. There were photos of Luke and Faith as toddlers astride the horse and her father holding the reins. Docile meant old, and in the photos his weariness and bewilderment are already visible. But in fact what the photos captured was only the onset, in fact the spring, of a terrible longevity. Even Glory remembered the ancient, moldy horse standing in the barn or pasture with his legs splayed out as if he expected the earth to tilt abruptly and was braced for it. It was his misfortune to be a horse, with enough persisting horse-like attributes, for example a mane and most of a tail, to have, in the eyes of children, a chivalric dignity and romance. So, year upon year, the matter of bringing an end to the tedium and confusion of his interminable life could not even be broached. Then finally one day he was gone. The boys made horrible jokes about how he had made a run for it, had charged through Gilead overturning matrons and baby carriages on his way to the freedom of the high plains. They took to calling glue and all that was gluelike Snowflake, to the irritation of their father and the bafflement of the younger children. Still, there was something about the fact that there had been a horse in that barn, that his trough still stood by the wall and his bridle still hung from a nail above it, that gave the barn itself a certain melancholy romance. A few motes of straw still managed to scintillate in any shaft of sunlight. It seemed sometimes as if her father must have meant to preserve all this memory, this sheer power of sameness, so that when they came home, or when Jack came home, there would be no need to say anything. In the terms of the place, they would all always have known everything.