HOUSEKEEPING by Marilynne Robinson Farrar, Straus & Giroux 219 pages; $10.95
Most small American towns have at least one: the "odd" house that everyone knows and gossips about, the old place going to seed on the outside while a hidden, perhaps unimaginable life transpires behind drawn shades or yellowing lace curtains. A home haunted by its occupants fascinates the neighbors and many, many writers; the phenomenon crops up from Poe to Faulkner to Harper Lee and beyond. That last category now includes Author Marilynne Robinson. Her unsettling first novel deals with the fall of yet another house, but from an unusual vantage. The story is told by an insider who helps pull down the roof.
Ruth Stone and her younger sister Lucille are deposited as small children at their grandmother's house in Fingerbone, an isolated community somewhere in Idaho. The girls' mother then drives a borrowed car Into the nearby lake and joins her father, who had drowned there years earlier. Ruth remembers: "My mother left me waiting for her, and established in me the habit of waiting and expectation which makes any present moment most significant for what it does not contain." Fingerbone ("a meager and difficult place") and the vast Northwest surrounding it give the growing girl plenty of emptiness to ponder.
When their grandmother dies, care of the castaway daughters eventually falls to their Aunt Sylvie, who comes back to Fingerbone from whereabouts and husband unknown. She is a gentle, oddly weatherless woman who poses no threat in the way of harshness or undue discipline. The girls like her, and worry: "Lucille and I still doubted that Sylvie would stay. She resembled our mother, and besides that, she seldom removed her coat, and every story she told had to do with a train or a bus station." The three settle into a land of amiable anarchy. They eat what and when they please: "Sylvie liked cold food, sardines aswim in oil, little fruit pies in paper envelopes." Leaves and debris gather unswept in the corners of rooms; piles of old newspapers, magazines, tin cans and bottles begin mounting in the parlor.
Sylvie glides effortlessly into ever more erratic behavior. She spends mesmerized hours staring into the lake that claimed her father and sister. She studies the local freightyard and checks on the hobos and transients riding through. The girls find her one day asleep on a bench near the center of town, a newspaper propped over her face. At home she falls into long silences, plays solitaire during the day and comes alive at night, keeping the lights out and letting the darkness in: "Sylvie in a house was more or less like a mermaid in a ship's cabin. She preferred it sunk in the very element it was meant to exclude."
Lucille finally senses how peculiar the three of them look to the town and escapes from "Sylvie's dream," moving in with a lonely but respectable schoolteacher. Ruth stays, increasingly convinced that "we are the same. She could as well be my mother." Well-meaning townspeople decide to save Ruth for ordinary society and have Sylvie declared unfit to raise her. When the success of this crusade seems assured, the aunt and niece decide to keep their house no longer.