Housekeeping
- by Marilyn Robinson
Marilyn Robinson’s book will have us reconsidering the ideas of home and grief, of who we are in relation to what we have lived- and how the natural world reinforces and carves out our edges. Robinson weaves together biblical imagery and psychological constructs to explore the nature of familial relationships with such exquisite writing that every detail echoes. Here is Robinson on her literary inheritances:
“If to admire and to be influenced are more or less the same thing, I must be influenced most deeply by the 19th-century Americans—Dickinson, Melville, Thoreau, Whitman, Emerson and Poe. Nothing in literature appeals to me more than the rigor with which they fasten on problems of language, of consciousness-bending form to their purposes, ransacking ordinary speech and common experience,
rummaging through the exotic and recondite, setting Promethean doubts to hymn tunes, refining
popular magazine tales into arabesques, pondering bean fields, celebrating the float and odor of hair,
always, to borrow a phrase from Wallace Stevens, in the act of finding what will suffice….I believe they
wished to declare the intrinsic dignity of all experience and to declare the senses bathed in revelation-–Marilyn Robinson detailing her literary frame of reference from Extending the American
Range: Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping by Martha Ravits, American Literature, Vol. 61,
No. 4 (Dec., 1989), pp. 644-666 Published by: Duke University Press