Housekeeping
Marilynne Robinson · 1980
Robinson's first novel, written before her twenty-four-year silence. Two orphaned sisters in a small Idaho town are raised by an aunt who increasingly cannot tell the difference between domestic order and wilderness, between the living and the dead. Sentences so attentive that critics now teach them line-by-line. The American answer to Mrs. Dalloway.
The case against
Almost nothing happens, slowly. Robinson's sentences are the event, and if their cadences leave you cold, two hundred pages of lake light and flooded rooms will feel like one long held breath. Sylvie's drifting gets the full lyric treatment; the book is less curious about what transience actually costs the children handed over to it.
Literary Fiction · the Pro canon
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