So, I actually finished reading this a few days ago. I've been sort of pondering it in the back of my head ever since, because the book took me rather by surprise. I decided to read it because it was mentioned on (where else?) Posy Gets Cozy, way back in the archives. Alicia spoke of it so engagingly that I thought I'd try reading it. It was out of my normal bailiwick (scifi, fantasy, alternative history, speculative fiction;) and I wanted to try something as completely apart from the Tombstone books as I could get.
Boy, was it ever.
Crane is the lit-lover of the two of us. Sure, I've read scads of books, everything from Terry Pratchett and Gene Wolf to George Orwell, Ray Bradbury and Octavia Butler to Dostoyevsky, Dumas and Hugo. But more often than not, reading is as far as I go. I like stories, and even though the philosopher in me gets quite a lot of mental meat from some very unexpected places, Crane is the one who really digs down into the mechanics of books and tries to understand them apart from the stories they tell. He calls it his inner English major. He recently read Valis by Philip K. Dick and said to me that "This, more than any other book, explains me." I thought that a little odd at the time, that a single book could somehow explain a person, highlight them in some complete and understandable way. Especially since Philip K. Dick wasn't exactly the most... hinged of persons.
But now I know what he meant. While reading Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, the sense of recognition mixed with utter nakedness was almost overwhelming. This was made even more strange by the fact that I felt as if both sisters were, in fact, me. I still have Lucille's internal conversations with imaginary passers-of-judgment, and sublimating my feelings of inferiority in plans to fix them is one of my hallmarks. At the same time, I feel Ruthie's dream-like sense of perpetual expectation just below the surface of me, and most of my legion of regrets are a direct result of waiting in expectation for things I should have gone out and taken care of on my own. What are written as two disparate sisters, reacting differently to an otherwise identical life, feel as if they are two halves of the whole of me.
In her post about Housekeeping, Alicia writes:
Housekeeping was the first book I'd read that gave a strange kind of substance to my own strange, melancholy childhood, though its plot was nothing like my own -- but its essence, the unraveling and re-knitting of its ideas and images, rang so familiar and clear that I finished it with huge relief, and quietly started making plans to do other things.
I probably won't give up on the idea of writing, since what I believe I would write, if I did so, would be more scifi/fantasy, but I feel as if a weight has been lifted, the onus of talking about my own life, in ways that make it sound the way it felt, the way it feels from day to day. I can move on and think and write about other things now.
I think at base, the book is about memory. How memory creates lives, and people, and gets bound up in their lives as both cause and effect. Where Gene Wolfe captures the feeling of the loss of living memory in Latro in the Mist, I think Robinson captures the essential nature of memory, and its ephemeral qualities better than any other writer I've come across.
The book probably isn't for everyone. The pacing and voice are very dreamlike, and oddly detached. This is entirely suitable to the story. The story itself, the plot, is sort of... small. What I mean is, it's not a grand retelling of momentous events. It's not the great American novel. It's not terribly comforting, if you identify too closely with it. But it captures a feeling so aptly, that it's hard to write it off as simple.
I've begun to read Robinson's second novel, Gilead. I may go back and re-read Over the Moon, first, since I have it via Inter-Library Loan, and will need to send it back soon, but also because I have a feeling that Gilead with branch out a littlre more than Over the Moon and Housekeeping did. More adventures, in the making.
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