By Kate Barrett
I believe there’s a problem I, and to some degree all writers, have which is an unabating attraction to what we don’t know. It drives us to unusual places and causes us to stare. It’s the curse and the joy of the observer, standing outside looking in. It means never getting comfortable, never staking claim. I don’t know for sure, but I imagine there are people in the world who go through life feeling at home. I am not one of them.
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"I was living and working in Lander, Wyoming, a place I never quite belonged but couldn’t help returning to ... The first book I read that summer was Housekeeping, and it couldn't have been more relevant."[/caption]
This is just what Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping is about—failing to belong and what we do about it. The story takes place in a small western town at the edge of a glacial lake. It centers on Ruth, the novel’s young narrator, and her sister Lucille, who both experience a series of abandonments and end up under the care of their eccentric, absent-minded Aunt Sylvie. A pervasive sense of loss and impermanence permeates the book from the start. It begins by telling the story of Ruth and Lucille’s grandfather, who died on a train when it slid from its tracks into Fingerbone’s lake, and goes on to tell how their mother drives off a cliff into that same icy water.
Ruth and Lucille spend much of their childhood inseparable, but they drift apart as the story progresses. They can’t help but react differently to their Aunt Sylvie’s strange and chaotic methods of keeping house. Lucille decides to move out, becoming quickly entrenched in what little society Fingerbone has to offer. Ruth, on the other hand, decides to stay. Eventually, when the courts begin to question Sylvie’s ability to care for a minor, she and Ruth simply … disappear.
I’ve been told there are certain books that come along at the right time in the right place. For me, Housekeeping was one of those books. Before I came to Lighthouse, I was living and working in Lander, Wyoming, a place I never quite belonged but couldn’t help returning to. It’s a small town at the mouth of Sinks Canyon, set precariously between flat plains and the foot of the Wind River Mountains. It attracts a particular breed of person—a type somewhere between woodsy outdoorsman and self-destructive artist. Drifters, some might call them. Transients, you could say.
The first book I read that summer was Housekeeping, and it couldn't have been more relevant. On its most basic level, the book is about grief and loss, the effect absence has on the course of everyday events, but it's also about, as one review states, "the dangers of transience." I would revise that to say the allure of transience.
I’ve since thought a lot about why I kept returning to Lander summer after summer. Sure, the people I met there were infectiously passionate, but they were also insatiable, restless in their pursuit of the dream. But what is the dream? And how do you live it? I decided, after watching so many people cycle through there, that the dream is to be who you wish you were, and you live it by way of temporary projection.
Maybe it’s a simple revelation, but I think the appeal of rootlessness comes down to the appeal of reinvention. Every new place affords the opportunity to create a perfect version of yourself in the eyes of others. In that way, I felt connected to the people I met in Lander—we were all storytellers in one sense or another, chasing the dream. We were also all homeless, either by choice or nature or both.
So many characters in Robinson’s book are homeless, whether they have a place to live or not, and their homelessness makes them ghostly. They embark on a wandering existence which pulls them away from solid ground and directs them toward the fluidity of Fingerbone's inscrutable lake. I speak of the mother and grandfather particularly, who become almost mythical, but also of Ruth and Sylvie, who in the end become myths as well, not by death but by choosing a life apart. All of them—even Lucille, caught in the comfort of social conformity—become ghosts to each other, shape shifters, shadows to long for and aspire toward finding again. This means constant feats of imagination and metaphor. The language itself is wispy and hard to hold onto, densely poetic. The line between concrete and abstract is deliciously thin.
At a certain point, the course the novel takes becomes inevitable. I think the only way Ruth and Lucille can remain connected is by that dramatic leave-taking (you’ll have to read it to know what I mean). Each then becomes a heightened figure in the other's dreams. Transience after all is the pursuit of that forever-high, where no one can discover your low points. It’s an attempt to construct the perfect story. I saw it all the time in Lander and, after reading Housekeeping, I saw it in myself.
It’s tempting to draw conclusions here, to call transience dangerous or hollow—I did leave Lander in the end, in favor of my home in Denver—but Housekeeping does no such thing. Like all good literature, it makes no judgments. It simply bears witness to the aftermath—an empty house, train tracks curving across the lake, questions left unanswered. One thing is for sure—this is a book written for writers, and it’s certainly worth the read.
