From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Jesse Larsen
Housekeeping begins "My name is Ruth." It ends with Ruth remarking that she had "never distinguished readily between thinking and dreaming" and realizing that her "life would be much different if I could ever say, This I have learned from my senses, while that I have merely imagined." Although Ruth and her sister Lucille spend most of their childhood in one house near a lake in Idaho - terrain described at length through poignant and radiant prose - Ruth never loses the feeling of being a homeless woman, a person who, with her sister, "had spent our lives watching and listening with the constant sharp attention of
children lost in the dark. It seemed that we were bewilderingly lost in a landscape that, with any light at all, would be wholly unfamiliar." In Housekeeping, lives change drastically just when nothing seems to be happening. Marilynne Robinson's vibrant and visual language floats and flows out of Ruth's most secret self, only to remind us how impossible it is to ever really get under another person's skin.
