On housekeeping and loneliness

I mentioned a few posts back that I read the first few pages of Housekeeping by Marilynne Rosbinson and then fell asleep. The truth is, there is little difference between sleeping and reading Housekeeping – so removed and dreamlike and ghostly is the tale it tells and the telling of the tale.

It’s a book you read in the borders of your own sanity, in the place that is always dreaming, in that part of you close to the point where you maintain your grasp on a “proper” life.

But it is by no means a crazy book. It is rather a book of family – what it is, even when everything it should be no longer exists – and of the dysfunction born out of tragedy. It was close to my heart in many ways, being the story of what becomes of three sisters after the death of their father in an accident that would disturb anyone. As I read it part of me was Sylvie and Ruthie – that part that knows what it would become if it shed responsibility and let go of being normal. Sylvie has taken her leave of living a proper life, and she takes you with her, till you also want to leave marshmallows on twigs for children you fancy dwell in the woods. It was hard to tell whether she’d quite lost her mind in her eccentricity, or just tethered it on a longer string.

I was gone from the world in this book, further and further as I read on, which to me is a good book – but still, I’d call it a little queer, if you asked me. Or at least, it made me feel queer. It is amongst the Observer’s 100 greatest novels of all time, but seems to be something of a sleeper, little known, and by all accounts I've gathered so far is not so good as Gilead, which won the Pulitzer in 2005.

Here’s a section, written from Ruthie’s perspective (a granddaughter in the story) after her sister has left, because all her sister wanted was the normal life and to make something of herself:

Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them. You simply say, “Here are the perimeters of our attention. If you prowl around under the windows till the crickets go silent, we will pull the shades. If you wish us to suffer your envious curiosity, you must permit us not to notice it.” Anyone with one solid human bond is that smug, and it is the smugness as much as the comfort and safety that lonely people covet and admire.