Housekeeping

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

In this lyrical novel, two orphaned girls are raised by a procession of eccentric female relatives in a remote town in the Inland Northwest.

Ruthie and Lucille first end up with their grandmother, then two eccentric maiden great-aunts who prove unequal to the task of raising two young children. They call upon the long-lost Sylvie, the girls' transient aunt; she agrees to raise Ruthie and Lucille in spite of her inclination to wander. Other than a train wreck and a suicide, that's about all that happens in this book. (You think that sounds exciting? It's not.)

Okay, confession: I'm no great fan of a plotless narrative like Housekeeping. I think that Robinson's Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead is a much stronger book. There, the endless philosophizing descriptions feel more natural (and believable) coming from an older pastor. They make less sense coming from the undereducated Ruthie; plus, the characters in Gilead have a stake in each other's lives, and experience real attachment and love. Gilead feels purposeful; Housekeeping admires the scenery.

The town of Fingerbone seems virtually unpeopled in this story because of Ruthie's utter friendlessness. Aside from her older sister, Lucille, she has no one. Her aunt Sylvie is so often lost in her own thoughts that she could be on another planet. And Lucille, resolute about achieving an ordinary life for herself, soon abandons Ruthie and Sylvie to their weirdness. There is a lot of beauty here, but it feels chilly.

All that said, Robinson's prose deserves to be called 'lapidary' without an ounce of sarcasm, so if you read books primarily to soak in language, this is for you. Each paragraph is a prose poem, only rarely overwritten. (Though a perpetual series of prose poems can get tedious for the rest of us who prefer plot and character interactions.) The descriptions of the Inland Northwest are spot-on, cold lakes and trains figuring most prominently. Fingerbone is modeled on Robinson's hometown of Sandpoint, Idaho.

This book is part of the NEA's Big Read, and I checked it out from the Colorado prison library I work in. We received ten free copies from a program called Words Beyond Bars. For the prison's purposes, I think that Gilead would have been a better choice (how attractive do you think Housekeeping is to an all-male audience that ordinarily enjoys a diet of fast-paced urban fiction and Star Wars books?) I'll be interested to see the reactions of the offenders when we do our book group! Maybe they will surprise me.

Quotable:

"That is to say that she conceived of life as a road down which one traveled, an easy enough road through a broad country, and that one's destination was there from the very beginning, a measured distance away, standing in ordinary light like some plain house where one went in and was greeted by respectable people and was shown to a room where everything one had ever lost or put aside was gathered together, waiting." - 9-10

"It was a source of both terror and comfort to me then that I often seemed invisible - incompletely and minimally existent, in fact. It seemed to me that I made no impact on the world, and that in exchange I was privileged to watch it unawares." - 106

"I simply let the darkness in the sky become coexistent with the darkness in my skull and bowels and bones. Everything that falls upon the eye is an apparition, a sheet dropped over the world's true workings. The nerves and the brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away, the curve of the back and the swing of the coat so familiar as to imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world, when in fact nothing is more perishable." - 116

"Fingerbone was moved to solemn pity. There was not a soul there but knew how shallow-rooted the whole town was. It flooded yearly, and had burned once." - 177

The Girls

The Girls by Lori Lansens
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Can you really know another person, even if you spend every waking moment with her? Ruby and Rose are conjoined twins narrating the story of their remarkable shared lives.

They are on the cusp of their 30th birthday, which will make them the oldest surviving pair of conjoined twins in history (though in reality that honor goes to Lori and George Schappell, born in 1961). Rose and Ruby are joined at the head and everyone in their small Canadian town refers to them simply as "the Girls." Rose, an aspiring writer and poet, begins recording their history: from the tornado that touched down on the day of their birth to the love story of their parents, Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash, to their present independent lives.

Aunt Lovey, their adopted mother, is the queen of love that is clear-sighted and tough. She has been married to Uncle Stash, a Slovakian immigrant, for most of her life. Rose narrates their love story and it is clear that there is a kind of conjoinment that is spiritual rather than physical.

Ruby, who is far more interested in archaeology and television than in literature, tells the Girls's story from her own perspective. Lansens is skilled at making their separate voices distinctive and convincing; she not only captures the difficulties of being conjoined, but also emotions that are not exclusive to sisters or twins.

Ruby and Rose have never met eyes but can feel the other's blush or the movement of a frown, and frequently misunderstand each other; it is this tension that Lansens uses to unforgettable effect. Ruby, herself not a writer, tends to blurt out the stunning details of their shared lives that Rose leaves out (or is perhaps working up to reveal in a more literary fashion). It's a virtuoso performance of narrative and voice.

The daily awkwardness of their condition is thoughtfully explored - for example, how do you plan a surprise party for someone who is with you literally every waking moment? What happens when one sister is sick and the other is not? The Girls are frequently embarrassed to be treated as a single person instead of two separate women. They are normal sisters with secrets and different opinions and tastes - some of my favorite moments are when you see the mixed results of one sister's occasional attempts at deceiving the other.

The events near the end of the book seem a bit unconvincing, but ultimately it's the characters and their separate but parallel journeys - as well as the secondhand love story of their parents - that make this novel so readable.

For your next read, character-driven stories abound, but Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson is a gorgeously written tale of sisters and family by a modern literary master. One of my other all-time favorite books about family love is Peace Like a River by Leif Enger. In her afterward to The Girls, Lansens provides a list of books for further reading, including Millie-Christine: Fearfully and Wonderfully Made by Joanne Martell, a historical account of two conjoined women born into slavery in the 1850s American South.

Cover note: I don't usually quibble about bad cover art, but in this case the jacket image of The Girls is so misleading that I have to say something. It's not only inaccurate, but also gives readers absolutely no indication of the content of the story and is guaranteed to lose your interest. Trust me, this is one book you can't judge by the cover.

Quotable:

"I've never set eyes on my sister, except in mirror images and photographs, but I know Ruby's gestures as my own, through the movement of her muscles and bone. I love my sister as I love myself. I hate her that way too." - 5

"We're not weird. We just have a weird condition." - 114

"I started to hum, and Aunt Lovey knew that I was gone, not physically of course, but that I had walked through a door and closed it behind me and could not be reached for comment. (Ruby has the same capacity to make a swift mental exit, and I've read about the phenomenon in other conjoined twins. Some people call it 'wandering.' It's a state of consciousness that is not quite here and not quite there, deeper than a daydream, not awake but not asleep. ...)" - 155