Marilynne Robinson. Housekeeping

So the wind that billowed her sheets announced to her the resurrection of the ordinary [italics mine]. Soon the skunk cabbage would come up, and the cidery smell would rise in the orchard, and the girls would wash and starch and iron their cotton dresses. And every evening would bring its familiar strangeness, and crickets would sing the whole night long, under her windows and in every part of the black wilderness that stretched away from Fingerbone on every side. And she would feel that sharp loneliness she had felt every long evening since she was a child. It was the kind of loneliness that made clocks seem slow and loud and made voices sound like voices across water. Old women she had known, first her grandmother and then her mother, rocked on their porches in the evenings and sang sad songs, and did not wish to be spoken to.
(pp. 17-18)

During those days Fingerbone was strangely transformed. If one should be shown odd fragments arranged on a silver tray and be told, "That is a splinter from the True Cross, and that is a nail paring dropped by Barabbas, and that is a bit of lint from under the bed where Pilate's wife dreamed her dream," the very ordinariness of the things would recommend them [italics mine]. Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, and finally has come to look and not to buy. So shoes are worn and hassocks are sat upon and finally everything is left where it was and the spirit passes on, just as the wind in the orchard picks up the leaves from the ground as if there were no other pleasure in the world but brown leaves, as if it would deck, clothe, flesh itself in flourishes of dusty brown apple leaves, and then drops them all in a heap at the side of the house and goes on. So Fingerbone, or such relics of it as showed above the mirroring waters, seemed fragments of the quotidian held up to our wondering attention, offered somehow as proof of their own significance. But then suddenly the lake and the river broke open and the water slid away from the land, and Fingerbone was left stripped and blackened and warped and awash in mud. (pp. 73-74)

Sylvie said that in fact Molly had gone to work as a bookkeeper in a missionary hospital. It was perhaps only from watching gulls fly like sparks up the face of clouds that dragged rain the length of the lake that I imagined such an enterprise might succeed. Or it was from watching gnats sail out of the grass, or from watching some discarded leaf gleaming at the top of the wind. Ascension seemed at such times a natural law. If one added to it a law of completion--that everything must finally be made comprehensible--then some general rescue of the sort I imagined my aunt to have undertaken would be inevitable. For why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of a hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old that our thoughts have abanoned other business? What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally? (p. 92)

Imagine a Carthage sown with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden? Light would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water--peaches and grapes are little more than that, and where the world was salt there would be greater need of slaking. For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. 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 any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing--the world will be made whole. (Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping [Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Picador, 1980), p. 152)

(Have you ever read a novel that was so nourishing, so delicious, that you couldn't bear to turn to its final page? A novel no sooner finished, than read once again in order that you might savour its language and unravel still more of its mysteries? That's Housekeeping. At first glance you wouldn't pay its paper-thin plot much more attention than you would Byron Bunch in Faulkner's Light in August. It's "just" an account of a couple of girls in Fingerbone, in the mountains of Idaho (where Marilynne Robinson grew up), who are raised by Sylvie, their half-crazed aunt. But so rich is its landscape, so elegant its sentences, so longing to see things whole, that it finally turns into an incandescent vision of what might be -- as luminescent as a white, shaggy head of bear grass glowing in the fog in the Cascades like a Japanese lantern. I sometimes think that Robinson's favorite word must be "and." You find it in Hemingway too, but they use it differently. In Hemingway, "and" threads one event to another like beads. But in Robinson, "and" connects everything to everything: water and fog and drizzle and ice and slush and mud-grey snow and snow-white snow, this world and the other -- all in a seamless web. The next time I read Housekeeping, I'm dipping my fingers in its waters, which fall and rise, freeze and thaw, burying the dead and nourishing the living. As it turns out, Marilynne Robinson, who teaches writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, grew up Calvinist, and has defended Calvin for his fervent celebration of the natural world as God's second scripture (for which, see her The Death of Adam). That's all quite a shock for one like me, raised on a more dour brand of Dutch Calvinism, both at home and at Calvin College! Her second novel, Gilead, is equally memorable -- a series of letters written by a retired preacher in Iowa to his grandson, if I remember correctly. And then there's Home, following up on several of the minor characters in Gilead who caught the author's imagination. Lovely novels, each and every one of them, seeking to make our broken world whole.)