Idaho
Suggested by: Rachel
Traveled: June 28-July 2

Unlike the plot-heavy epics of previous stops, Housekeeping is a book of few pages, a story that swells with daily moments and detailed simplicity. I feel as though I’ve stumbled upon an allegory, ancient in its truths and easily familiar. It’s possible that Sylvie and Ruth inhabit pages next to Cain and Noah and Moses, I just wasn’t paying close enough attention in Sunday School. The train at the bottom of a lake somewhere in Idaho winks its ghostly reflection back at the genesis tales of Eden.

The thematic richness of Housekeeping is almost too much to unpack. I don’t plan to use this touchpoint of a post to capture the depths that the story stirs, so for now, I won’t try. But there are phrases and sentences in Housekeeping that I want to hold like a hard candy on my tongue, sucking and savoring them. So I’ll let Robinson speak for herself:

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“Never since they were small children had they clustered about her so, and never since then had she been so aware of the smell of their hair, their softness, breathiness, abruptness. It filled her with a strange elation, the same pleasure she had felt when any one of them as a sucking child, had fastened her eyes on her face and reached for her other breast, her hair, her lips, hungry to touch, eager to be filled for a while and sleep.” — page 11

“She had no other family, except her husband, Charley, who sat on her porch with his hands on his knees and his belly in his lap, his flesh mottled like sausage, thick veins pulsing in his temples and in the backs of his hands. He conserved syllables as if to conserve breath.” — page 21

“…it was a surprise to me when I realized that Lucille had begun to regard other people with the calm, horizontal look of settled purpose with which, from a slowly sinking boat, she might have regarded a not-too-distant shore.” — page 92

“To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know anything so utterly as when we lack it?” — page 152

“The horns of the ferries made huge, delicate sounds, like cows lowing. They should have left a milky breath in the air.” — page 212

“If one is lost on the water, any hill is Ararat. And below is always the accumulated past, which vanishes but does not vanish, which perishes and remains. If we imagine that Noah’s wife, when she was old, found somewhere a remnant of the Deluge, she might have walked into it till her widow’s dress floated above her head and the water loosened her plaited hair. And she would have left it to her sons to tell the tedious tale of generations.” — page 172