Marilynne Robinson's debut novel — a lyrical story of two sisters in rural Idaho raised by their grandmother, then a series of aunts, as they drift toward opposite poles of permanence and transience.
Lyrical minimalism: Housekeeping established Robinson's distinctive prose style — meditative, image-saturated, resistant to conventional plot — and her central thematic concerns (the problem of permanence and loss, the spectral quality of those who have departed, the tension between domestic stability and wandering). The novel's final act (the burning of the house, the sisters' different choices) is among the most formally complete endings in contemporary American fiction.
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