Castaways

By Paul Gray

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.

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

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