Key themes
- Transience as a way of living — and those who choose it
- Memory, water and the past that is never really gone
- Two sisters and the different hungers that will take them in opposite directions
About this book
Two sisters are left by their mother at their grandmother's house in the isolated town of Fingerbone, Idaho, and eventually passed between aunts until their eccentric Aunt Sylvie arrives to care for them. Robinson's debut is a slow, luminous meditation on memory, transience and the particular form of freedom that comes from having nothing left to lose.
Published in 1980, Housekeeping was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize and won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. It established Robinson as a major American writer, though she did not publish another novel for 24 years.
Discussion questions
- The novel's central tension is between housekeeping — the effort to maintain and domesticate — and transience, the opposite. What is Robinson arguing through Sylvie's mode of living?
- Water permeates the novel — the lake that took the family's grandfather, the floods, the rain. How does Robinson use this motif — and what does water mean in the novel's symbolic system?
- Ruthie and Lucille respond differently to Sylvie's eccentric care. How does Robinson show this divergence — and what does Lucille's eventual choice say about what it costs to leave?
- The novel is narrated retrospectively, from a position outside the events. What does this temporal remove achieve — and how does it relate to the novel's meditation on memory?
- Housekeeping is Robinson's debut, written before Gilead. How does it relate to the later novels — what preoccupations does she return to, and what has changed?
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