I’ve just finished reading Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. It’s brilliant. It really is. It is so brilliant that I am quite sure I don’t understand it, but also so brilliant that I think I might (because perhaps anyone can write such as to lose most of his readers). At any rate, I’ve gotten quite a bit out of it– more than the list of vocabulary words and more than the brilliant passages. I look forward to discussing it with friends at the next meeting of the Sixty-Six Dogs book club.
I don’t know how old Ms. Robinson was when she wrote this book, but it was first published in 1980. She has written three other works of non-fiction since, and then last year won the Pulitzer for Gilead, another novel that amazed me. I was delighted to receive Gilead for my birthday, as I will need to read it and read it and read it again.
Marilynne Robinson is a Really Wonderful Writer.
There is not a line of Housekeeping to be overlooked. There is not a choice of noun or adjective that is not precise, wonderful, and plain– plain in its simplicity and plain in its perfection. I have made myself a list of vocabulary words from this book; I have a list of page numbers highlighting passages that want attention, either for their meaning or– and this more common and more vastly true– for their art. Here’s an example, a picture of a woman fishing– for souls as opposed to fish:
“Even now I always imagine her leaning from the low side of some small boat, dropping her net through the spumy billows of the upper air. Her net would sweep the turning world unremarked as a wind in the grass, and when she began to pull it in, perhaps in a pell-mell ascension of formal gentlemen and thin pigs and old women and odd socks that would astonish this lower world, she would gather the net, so easily, until the very burden itself lay all in a heap just under the surface. One last pull of measureless power and ease would spill her catch into the boat, gasping and amazed, gleaming rainbows in the rarer light.”
Her writing leaves me as Annie Dillard’s writing leaves me: grinning in frank admiration of her word choice, wondering how those marvelous words come at her and how she catches them; and displaced in soul by what those words carry in their wake. Pleased and distressed and moved and grateful. And always– Always– always sad, because I cannot write like that.
