It’s fitting in many ways that my first Fiction Fortnight post is about a book that I didn’t want to finish. Somehow, in the last two weeks this book became a conversation I was having that was stimulating, reflective, challenging – everything you want a good conversation to be – and I didn’t want it to be over.
Funnily enough, as a ‘book’ I felt it fell a little short of my expectations…all those ridiculous demands we make, like an exciting plot-line, well-written, gripping from the first page etc. This book was none of those things. It took me awhile to get into it; the language was sometimes ridiculously flowery; and the plot more than often stagnant. But it didn’t matter. Just like when we see the bumps and scars of people we love (and love them more for them), it was precisely these things that made me fall in love with the book, and not want it to end.
The book is Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, for which she won the PEN/Hemingway award for best first novel. I could tell you what it’s about, but that would almost defeat the style of the novel. It’s not really about anything. Rather, the reader is taken on a journey to explore, through language and subtle but charming characters, well, life. And that’s Robinsons style – meandering, musing, never drawing any great conclusions but leaving the reader feeling as though something significant has been navigated. She says things like:
“Fingerbone was never an impressive town. It was chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere.”
And it’s phrases like that that drew me in, and made me feel like I was having a comfortable coze with a chum on the couch, wrapped in blankets and drinking hot tea, ruminating about life and feeling very grand and important. A good friend of mine, after finishing a different book of Robinsons, once said to me
“I feel like I’ve just said goodbye to an old friend.”
I didn’t bother asking him what the book was about (or if I did ask, he couldn’t have told me). With Robinson, it doesn’t seem to matter – she leaves an indelible impression on your psyche. It’s funny and remarkable and fantastic to me that books can do that – that somehow, it becomes a familiar and comfortable place to inhabit for awhile. Has this been anyone else’s experience?
