Housekeeping by Marylynne Robinson

For Discussion October 1, 2008 - 6:30 P.M.

Housekeeping is a haunting and unforgettable work of art about the transitory nature of love and the impermanence of all things. Ruth, the young narrator of Housekeeping, is taken with her sister, Lucille, to the small Idaho town of Fingerbone to live with their grandmother. They are brought by their mother, Helen, who leaves them on the porch and then drives her car into the town lake where her own father drowned years before.

The girls are raised by a series of relatives, and finally come under the care of Sylvie, their aunt, an elusive transient who agrees to return to Fingerbone to make a home for them. At first her eccentricities seem unimportant to the girls, but as time goes on, her behavior becomes increasingly erratic. Lucille determines that she will lead a conventional life, and eventually separates herself from her peculiar aunt. Ruth, grief-stricken by the loss of her mother and increasingly detached from the life of the surrounding community, responds to Sylvie’s tragic yet powerful and poetic vision of the world and, in the end, joins her in her life of wandering.

About the Author:

MARILYNNE ROBINSON was born and raised in Idaho, where her family has lived for several generations. She received a B.A. from Brown University in 1966 and a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Washington in 1977. Housekeeping, her first novel, was published in 1981 and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction and the American Academy and Institute’s Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award Robinson lives in Iowa City, Iowa, with her family.

Discussion Questions:

1. Why do you think Marilynne Robinson has chosen Housekeeping as the title for her novel? What does the concept of housekeeping mean to Sylvie? To the girls’grandmother? To Lucille? Why is the idea of housekeeping such an important one in this book?

2. How do the geography and character of Fingerbone mold and shape the lives of the people who live there? How does the fact that Fingerbone is “shallow-rooted” (p. 177), a “meager and difficult place” affect Ruth and her family?

3. Do you find that the three generations of Foster women—the grandmother, Sylvie and her sisters, and Ruth and Lucille—share certain unusual or eccentric qualities? Do they have similar attitudes toward men and marriage?

4. Why do you think that Sylvie ventured out onto the railroad bridge (p. 81)? Was it from simple curiosity, as she assures the girls, or is it possible that she was actually thinking of killing herself, of dying in the lake like her sister and father? Where else in the novel can you find images of drowning?

5. At what point in the novel do you begin to notice the differences between Ruth and Lucille? Is Lucille’s wish for a ‘normal’ life evident early in the story, or does it take hold only as she reaches adolescence? What is the significance of Ruth’s and Lucille’s dreams?

6. What is Lucille’s attitude toward Ruth? Does Lucille purposely leave Ruth behind, or does she try to save her?

7. If you were one of Sylvie’s acquaintances or neighbors, you might consider her mad. After seeing her through Ruth’s eyes, do you believe that she is in fact mad?

8. What happens to Ruth during the day she spends alone at the abandoned house in the mountains (chap. 8)? How does this experience affect the direction she will take in life? How does her relationship with Sylvie change at this point?

9. “Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world’s true workings” (p. 116). What is Ruth saying in the long paragraph which contains this sentence, and how does this central idea of illusion, the unreality of reality, contribute to her leaving Fingerbone with Sylvie?

10. Why do Sylvie and Ruth attempt to burn down the house at the end of the novel?