Not Oprah’s Book Club: Housekeeping

Marilynne Robinson is a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, and this, her first novel, clearly demonstrates why. It’s simply beautiful, chock full of so many breathtaking turns of phrase, emotional insights, and strange familiarities. It’s the story of Lucille and Ruth, orphaned when their mother commits suicide and forced to live with, first their grandmother, than two great aunts, and finally their mother’s truly strange sister. As Lucille and Ruth become adolescents, they face the struggle of their motherlessness and the beauty of the surrounding small town with deep and cutting contrast.
I found myself repeatedly forced to unearth a pen from the depths of my bag or couch just to underline some unforgettable sentence–something that I rarely do when reading novels. A few of my favorites:

When do our senses know anything so utterly as when we lack it?
She was a music that I no longer heard, that rang in my mind, itself and nothing else, lost to all sense, but not perished.
And below is always the accumulated past, which vanishes but does not vanish, which perishes and remains.

As you can see, it’s largely about memory and the senses and family and lost love. Not light fare, but so totally worth the heaviness. Next up, Gilead.