(2 of 2)
Sylvie and Ruth are passive, quicksilver characters, prone to skittering off at a hint of pressure. Having created wraiths without motives or accountable pasts, Author Robinson left herself a big problem: how to nudge them through a plot, make them interesting, worthy of attention, when they seem so indifferent about themselves. She solved it with language. Ruth's narrative is as colorful as she is pal lid. For a self-confessed dreamer with a tenuous hold on reality, she shows a keen sense of the here and now, and of the right words to record it. She notices "a big green couch so weighty and shapeless that it looked as if it had been hoisted out of 40 feet of water." She registers the sounds of dawn: "There were cries of birds, sharp and rudimentary, that stung like sparks or hail." And the look of dusk: "The sky glowed like a candled egg."
Housekeeping has a few slack moments. Ruth occasionally meditates on a scene without sufficiently setting it. She sometimes meanders. But this first novel does much more than show promise; it brilliantly portrays the impermanence of all things, especially beauty and happiness, and the struggle to keep what can never be owned. Robinson, 37, who lives with her husband and two sons in Massachusetts, grew up in Sandpoint, Idaho, before majoring in English at Brown and earning a Ph.D. at the University of Washington. Though she says that Housekeeping is "totally not autobiographical," the novel's vivid landscapes betray the presence of an author who lived among them, just as the prose points to someone who studies and loves language. She is now working slowly on a second novel, writing paragraphs here and there when the spirit moves her. "It will come when it comes," she says. That is a prediction, but readers may wish to take it as a promise. —By Paul Gray