the 941

Back in August, I suffered a bit of a breakdown in 941 Book CL-B decorum, wondering publicly if anything I might blog about here really adds to the understanding of or interest in the books that find their way to my shelf. But then a couple commenters chimed in, told me to buck up and encouraged me to make my way through Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. Although I had to make a few detours before I got to it (had to review a couple other books for the paper) I completed Housekeeping a few weeks ago, and luckily so. It’s the kind of book that’s strong enough to make you believe in writing again.

Robinson is a marvelous stylist, and Housekeeping, her first novel, is ruthlessly economical in the way it tells the story of a young girl growing up in a fracturing household in a small Idaho town beset by savage weather. Robinson’s sentences just amaze you with their force. Here is Robinson’s narrator on the caretaking she receives from her grandmother:

She had always known a thousand ways to circle them all around with what must have seemed like grace. She knew a thousand songs. Her bread was tender and her jelly was tart, and on rainy days she made cookies and applesauce. In the summer she kept roses in a vase on the piano, huge, pungent roses, and when the blooms ripened and the petals fell, she put them in a tall Chinese jar, with cloves and thyme and sticks of cinnamon. Her children slept on starched sheets under layers of quilts, and in the morning her curtains filled with light the way sails fill with wind.

Passages like that let you know you’re in capable hands, and Robinson’s moral vision is equal to her way with words. In the end, she is able to invest the life of a small-town transient with layers and layers of feeling and memory, and avoids any kind of clichéd “explanation” — drug abuse, domestic violence — for her heroine’s fate. Commenter Andy called the book “so cold,” and I have to agree: Housekeeping is a spare, quiet, zer0-degree masterpiece.

Upcoming entries in The 941 Book CL-B:

• Henry James’ The Wings of the Dove
• What will land on this list next? Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies? Franz Kafka’s Amerika: The Missing Person? Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus? Richard Price’s Clockers? Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia? Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbo? Saul Bellow’s Herzog? Jorge Luis Borges’ Collected Fictions? James Merrill’s Voices From Sandover? Richard Powers’ Operation Wandering Soul? You won’t know unless you tune in, so to speak, next time.

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