The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Marilynne Robinson · a novel in numbered chapters, told by Ruth · Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1980 · scored on Robinson’s English as published in 1980, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Novel of family and loss in one first-person retrospect; domestic comedy, elegy and scriptural meditation made one voice
Mythos
The Flood enacted in a house that consents to the water; the daughter who follows an older woman out of her people; the lake as the place of the dead; a presumed drowning that is a departure into another life
Phase
Ruth’s girlhood in Fingerbone, from the sisters’ arrival at their grandmother’s house to the night of the crossing, told from after the end; the grandfather’s death and the grandmother’s widowhood before it, imagined
Presentation
Fiction; a short novel in numbered chapters, told by Ruth, the elder sister, who tells as memory much that she could not have seen
Register
Long, periodic, cadenced sentences in the manner of the King James, closing on plain words; comedy and grief in one key
Scale
One house, one town and one lake; three generations of women and the men who died or left them
Governing Proposition
Two sisters are left by their mother at their grandmother’s house in a railroad town on a mountain lake, the lake that took their grandfather with his train and then takes their mother with a borrowed car; they pass from the grandmother to two great-aunts and then to their mother’s sister, a transient, until the younger chooses the settled world and the elder goes with her aunt across the railroad bridge at night, taken by the town for drowned. The wager of the novel is that memory is a form of loss which pulls the living after the dead, that the order a community calls care can be its refusal of what is lost, and that a voice can remember what it never saw and so make the lost present.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“My name is Ruth.” The novel begins with its narrator naming herself, and the paragraph that follows names those who had her care, in order: her grandmother, Sylvia Foster; on her death, her husband’s sisters, Lily and Nona Foster; on their flight, her daughter Sylvie, the girls’ aunt, a transient. Each custodian comes with her departure set beside her in a clause, so that the first paragraph is the book in small: custody passing from hand to hand, and each hand letting go. Ruth has a younger sister, Lucille, and the two girls are what is passed.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Housekeeping in New York in 1980. It was Marilynne Robinson’s first novel; her second, Gilead, did not follow until 2004. The book is short, in numbered chapters, and almost nothing in it is incident in the ordinary sense: two drownings told from long after, a death, a flight, a defection, a hearing, a fire and a crossing. What fills it is a voice. Ruth narrates in the first person, looking back from after the end, in long cadenced sentences that move from the things of a house to the Flood and the resurrection without changing key.
The place is Fingerbone, a railroad town on a glacial lake in the mountains of northern Idaho, crossed by a long railroad bridge. No year is given for the action. Ruth tells much that she could not have seen, her grandfather’s death, her grandmother’s widowhood, her mother’s last drive, and tells it in full, as memory. The habit is not a lapse in the point of view. It is the book’s claim: that memory and imagination are one faculty, and that to remember is to make the lost present. The rest of the novel will show what that faculty costs, and whom it pulls after it.
Movement II
The first loss is the grandfather’s. Edmund Foster was aboard the Fireball, the passenger train that slid off the bridge into the lake at night, and the train was never recovered. Ruth gives the scene she never saw as if she had stood on the shore, the train going down into the black lake in the dark. From then on the lake is the place of the dead in Fingerbone, and the bridge across it the thing the town lives beside. The grandmother is left a widow in the house with her daughters, and Ruth imagines her widowhood too.
The second loss repeats the first. Helen, the girls’ mother, brings her daughters to the grandmother’s house, leaves them there, and drives a borrowed car off a cliff into the same lake. The book sets her death beside her father’s, two deaths by one water, and lets the likeness do the work. The grandmother keeps the girls until her own death, which is quiet, and the custody passes on. Already the shape of the book is plain: the water takes, and the house holds what it can for as long as it can.
The great-aunts are the comedy. Lily and Nona Foster come to the house, fuss over drafts and over the girls, and talk anxiously of their return to Spokane. They show what ordinary custody looks like: careful, timid, attached to comfort, and unable to hold what has been handed to them. Their retreat to Spokane brings the girls their mother’s sister. Robinson draws the aunts with affection and exactness, and without them the book would have no measure of the settled life against which Sylvie is set.
Movement III
Sylvie is a transient, and she keeps house as a transient would. Newspapers and tins accumulate in the parlour; leaves blow into the rooms and stay; meals are eaten in the dark; she is found asleep on a park bench. The housekeeping of the title is hers, and it is the reverse of the great-aunts’: a keeping that lets the weather in, as if a house should not stand between its people and the world outside. Lucille turns from it. Ruth begins to belong to it.
Then the flood fills the house, and Sylvie and Ruth move through rooms of standing water. The Flood is enacted here, not alluded to: the house becomes the reverse of an ark, a shelter that consents to the water. Around such scenes Ruth’s meditations gather, on Noah, on Cain and Abel, on Lot’s wife looking back, and on the resurrection, and in one of them the book states its law: “Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it.” To remember the drowned is to be drawn toward the lake.
The sisters stop going to school. They walk the shore of the lake and the edges of the town, and the round of truancy and walking comes back more often than the argument needs. Through it the two girls divide. Lucille wants what other girls have, a house kept as houses are kept; Ruth wants what Sylvie is. The narration presses aphorism into this drift without breaking it, “Fact explains nothing” among them, and the comedy of the opening turns slowly into something graver, with no change in the sentence that carries it.
Movement IV
Lucille leaves. She goes to live with her home economics teacher, and with her goes the settled world: dressmaking, order, a house that keeps the outside out. The book does not mock her choice, and it does not endorse Ruth’s. It sets two loyalties against each other, to the living order and to the dead and the transient, and lets each be what it is. Without Lucille’s defection Ruth’s staying would be mere drift; with it, Ruth has something to choose against.
Sylvie takes Ruth out on the lake in a borrowed rowboat and keeps her there through a night. They come to an abandoned homestead in a cold valley, and Ruth, left alone, imagines children at the edge of the trees. Desire for the lost and its having are made one: “To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow.” The night on the water is the rehearsal for the end.
The town now moves. The church women visit; the sheriff and the court come into it; and the town moves toward taking Ruth from Sylvie. Each visit is kind, and each is coercive, and the book holds both truths at once. Fingerbone’s charity is the great-aunts’ timidity grown into an institution: the settled life defending itself against a loss it cannot prevent.
Movement V
Sylvie and Ruth set fire to the house and cross the railroad bridge on foot at night, the bridge from which the Fireball fell. The town believes them drowned. What the lake took from the grandfather and the mother it is supposed, at the end, to have taken from the daughter and the granddaughter; and the presumed death is their departure into another life, the transient’s, given in a few pages and not from inside. The book offers the crossing as both death and survival and does not choose between them.
The close moves into the conditional. Ruth imagines Lucille in places she will never see, in a Boston restaurant, among the settled, and says of her that she “does not watch, does not listen, does not wait, does not hope, and always for me and Sylvie.” The litany of what Lucille does not do is the book’s last figure of absence, and the form closes on the loss it has argued. Whether the voice speaks from a transient’s life or as one of the dead the town believes her to be, the novel leaves open.
The book won the PEN/Hemingway Award for a first novel in 1981, and Bill Forsyth filmed it in 1987, with Christine Lahti as Sylvie. It has been in print since it was published, taught in American universities and writing programmes, and named among novelists out of proportion to its sales. For twenty-four years Robinson published no second novel; when Gilead came in 2004, it brought a wider public back to the first. Its estate is small, a bridge, a lake and a voice that remembers what it never saw, and it has kept.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test finds a short book that resists it. Each loss prepares the next custody: the grandfather’s train sliding from the bridge into the lake, the mother’s car driven into the same water, the grandmother’s quiet death, the great-aunts’ retreat to Spokane, then Sylvie. Remove the great-aunts and the comedy that shows what ordinary custody looks like is gone; remove Lucille’s defection to her teacher and Ruth’s choice has nothing to be chosen against; remove the night on the lake and the abandoned homestead and the crossing at the end has no rehearsal. The scale is compelled: a book about what is kept and what is lost keeps very little itself. Charged: the middle round of truancy and walks along the shore repeats more often than the argument needs, and some of Ruth’s meditations restate in a second figure what the first already carried.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: memory is a form of loss that pulls the living after the dead, and the order a community calls care can be the means by which it refuses the claim of what is lost. “Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it.” Two loyalties are set against each other, to the settled world, which Lucille chooses, and to the dead and the transient, which Ruth chooses with Sylvie, and neither is called a cure. The town’s charity, from the church women’s visits to the sheriff and the court, is kindness and coercion at once. Three generations of women left by men, by death and by one another make an articulated condition, not a mood. Held near the bar: the lake, the dark and the cold carry much of the meaning as atmosphere, and the transient life Ruth enters is given in a few pages, not disclosed from inside.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Elevation is the book’s ordinary pitch, and it comes often. The Fireball sliding off the bridge into the black lake at night, never recovered. The flood that fills the house, Sylvie and Ruth moving through rooms of standing water. The night on the lake in a borrowed rowboat, and the cold valley of the abandoned homestead where Ruth, left alone, imagines children at the edge of the trees. The crossing of the bridge in the dark. The close, Lucille in a Boston restaurant as Ruth imagines her, who “does not watch, does not listen, does not wait, does not hope, and always for me and Sylvie.” Between these, the meditations on Lot’s wife, the Flood and the resurrection rise in the sentence itself. Held below the top: the elevation keeps to one register, elegiac and luminous, and seldom reaches terror or grandeur outside it.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Myth built, not only evoked. The lake and the bridge are the structure: the water takes the grandfather with his train and the mother with her car, and the book ends with Ruth and Sylvie crossing the same bridge on foot at night and taken by the town for drowned, a death that is their departure into another life. The Flood is enacted in the house, which becomes the reverse of an ark: a shelter that consents to the water. Ruth’s name carries the Book of Ruth, the daughter who follows an older woman out of her people; Sylvie is the woodland figure, half of the outdoors. The figures stay particular: tins stored in the parlour, Sylvie asleep on a park bench. Held below the top: part of the myth is glossed in Ruth’s meditations, on Cain and Abel, Lot’s wife and Noah, rather than borne by the action, and the names point more than they build.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The inheritance is plain: the King James Bible and the Calvinist sermon, Melville, Dickinson, Emerson and above all Thoreau, whose cabin stands behind this house, and the story of the child who lights out from the civilising household for the territory. The turn is in two places. The book took Huck Finn’s flight and gave it to a girl and her aunt, with housekeeping both the thing fled and the thing remade; and it arrived in 1980, in the years of Carver and the minimal story, as a first novel of almost no event, in a long, cadenced, meditative prose that argues loss, memory and resurrection in a narrator’s voice. The stake was real: a first book wagered on a register its period had set aside. Held below the bar: the instrument is a proven American visionary tradition, and the departure lies more in what the book stood against than in a new road.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. Ruth narrates from after the end and freely tells what she could not have seen: the grandfather’s death, the grandmother’s widowhood, Helen’s last drive, all imagined in full and told as memory. That habit is the book’s knowledge: memory and imagination are one faculty, and to remember is to make the lost present and to be pulled toward them. The first sentence, “My name is Ruth,” and the paragraph that follows, a list of those who had her care, set the form of the whole: custody passing from hand to hand, each hand letting go. The ending moves into the conditional, imagining Lucille in places Ruth will never see, so that the form closes on the absence it has argued. Held off the top: stretches of the middle could be told in the third person with little loss, and some meditations stand beside the action rather than within it.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Evidence over forty-six years, widened after Gilead (2004) brought readers back to the first novel. The book has been read as a feminist novel of female kinship and of flight from the domestic; as a revision of Thoreau and of the American myth of the frontier; as a Calvinist meditation on loss and resurrection; and as a novel of water and place. The questions it plants stay open: whether Ruth’s choice is liberation or the inheritance of her mother’s despair; whether Sylvie saves her or ruins her; whether the voice of the close speaks from a transient’s life or as one of the dead the town believes her to be; whether the town is wrong. The sentence rewards return. Held below the top: forty-six years is a short test, the criticism, real and growing, is smaller than that of the most argued American novels of its decades, and part of the figure is forecast.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The field is the American novel of the late twentieth century. The force is real: the book showed that a novel of almost no event could carry metaphysical argument in a first-person voice, that the domestic novel could be turned against domesticity, and that the scriptural and Emersonian sentence could still serve an American novelist at the height of minimalism. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the PEN/Hemingway Award for a first novel in 1981; Bill Forsyth’s film of 1987; and a standing among writers, as one of the books novelists name, out of proportion to its sales. What holds the axis in the low eights is the reach: no second novel followed for twenty-four years, the book founded no school, and its effect on later fiction is easier to assert than to document. Influence carried later through Robinson’s own novels is delayed, and is credited and discounted.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Survival is shown over forty-six years, and credited as shown, not foreseen. The form is whole: the text survives as published, and has been in print throughout; form and fabric take no charge. The presence is continuous: taught in American universities and writing programmes, filmed in 1987, and read again by a wider public after Gilead and the novels that followed it. The surface is not fixed to its moment: the railroad town is given without dates or brands, and nothing in the book depends on 1980. Held where it is: the presence is wide in American literary reading and narrower beyond it, short of the widest a book of its age can show; and decades demonstrate less than centuries.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged on Robinson’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the long sentence and its measure: periodic, cadenced, clause laid on clause in the manner of the King James, closing on a plain word. The opening paragraph, a run of custodians in order with each departure in a subordinate clause, is a comedy of syntax as much as a list of losses. The exactness is of things and habits: the great-aunts’ anxieties, Sylvie eating in the dark, the newspapers and tins kept in the parlour, the leaves blown into the rooms. Aphorism is pressed into the narration without breaking it: “Fact explains nothing”; “To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow.” Charged: the dialogue is sparse and Lucille’s speech flatter than the narration around her; the late chapters carry plot in summary; and a few meditations reach for an elevation the plain passages earn better.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the great-aunts, Lily and Nona, fussing over drafts and planning their return to Spokane, and the night on the lake and the crossing of the bridge. One law governs both: what a person cannot hold, the water takes, and the settled life is a defence against a loss it cannot prevent. The aunts’ comedy is the same flight from loss as Lucille’s dressmaking and the town’s visits; Sylvie’s housekeeping, letting the weather and the lake into the rooms, is the opposite consent to it, and the book holds both under one physics. Comedy and grief share one register throughout. Charged on two counts: the range is narrow by design, a house, a town and a lake, and narrowness is not coherence; and the crossing, offered as both death and survival, asks the law to carry a double reading the book leaves open by intent.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged on what a short novel holds. Consciousness, fully, in Ruth’s voice. The family across three generations of women and the men who died or left them. The town as society: the school, the church women, the sheriff and the court that moves for custody. The natural order, held at length: the lake, the flood, the cold, the mountains and the forests. The sacred, in Ruth’s meditations and the book’s scriptural frame. These are integrated, through the house and the water. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the narrow social field: history is thin, the railroad and the town glimpsed and the country beyond Fingerbone almost absent; labour is barely present, no one in the present working except at keeping house; and the state appears only as the sheriff and the court. The figure describes the form.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 8.9, then The Sublime and The Living Form at 8.8. A command of the long English sentence, periodic and cadenced, that carries comedy, grief and scriptural argument in one key; an elevation that is the book’s ordinary pitch, from the Fireball in the lake to the crossing of the bridge; and a form in which a narrator who remembers what she never saw makes memory and imagination one faculty, closing on the absence it has argued.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.7, held by the narrow social field: history thin, labour barely present and the state only a sheriff and a court, in a book that holds one house, one town and one lake. Next above it, Pressure on Tradition at 8.2: real force against the minimal manner of its decade, with a reach concentrated among writers, delayed by twenty-four years without a second novel, and easier to assert than to document.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 8.9, The Living Form at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on two axes: The Archetypal Deep at 8.7, The Unconcealment at 8.6 and The Imperishable at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.4 falls a tenth short and Pressure on Tradition at 8.2 three tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it counts falls below 8.2, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.7. Four of the five summit conditions are met; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, at 8.5, stands below it as well.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, scored as the novel published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, in 1980, her first; no revised text is known, and the published book is the unit. No text of the novel was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Robinson’s English, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain; quotations are not cited by chapter, since the placing of each passage is beyond this reading. The length of the book in pages, the number of its chapters, the decade in which its present action is set, the grandfather’s occupation, and the languages into which it has been translated could not be verified, and are not given. The film of 1987 is named as reception and is not scored.