Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson with Professor George Handley

We had the wonderful opportunity to discuss Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping with George Handley and to marvel all over again at the astonishing beauty of Robinson's prose. Our guest, George Handley, is a professor of humanities at Brigham Young University whose work explores the intersections of literature, religion, and the natural world. A scholar of Marilynne Robinson's writing, he has published on Housekeeping and has interviewed Robinson about her work.

Set in the fictional town of Fingerbone in northern Idaho, Housekeeping follows sisters Ruth and Lucille, who, after a series of losses, are eventually left in the care of their unconventional aunt Sylvie. As the girls grow, they begin to respond very differently to Sylvie's transient way of living and to the question of what it means to belong somewhere at all.

We weren't always in agreement about whether Ruth ultimately finds the ending, or the life, she is best suited for. But we did agree that the depth and richness of Housekeeping reward discussion, contemplation, and certainly more than one reading.

Our conversation kept returning to the idea of home: home as a place, home as the people who hold us, and home as something we inhabit within ourselves. We talked about "housekeeping" as more than the tending of a physical space. It can also be a metaphor for remaining housed within our own minds and bodies, and for what it might mean to become, in some sense, an unhoused soul.

Finally, we considered Robinson's larger spiritual vision: that whatever our mortal state, whatever has been lost, broken, displaced, or left incomplete, there is the promise of a grand completion in the Resurrection.

It was a beautiful conversation about a book that somehow becomes larger every time we return to it. If you've read Housekeeping, we hope you'll join us. And if you haven't, perhaps this is your invitation.

For additional reading by George Handley, look here