Housekeeping
Robinson's first novel, written before her twenty-four-year silence. Two orphaned sisters in a small Idaho town are raised by an aunt who increasingly cannot tell the difference between domestic order and wilderness, between the living and the dead. Sentences so attentive that critics now teach them line-by-line. The American answer to Mrs. Dalloway.
The metaphors call attention to their own making, and one reader reports “I can almost SEE the stitching” instead of the image. Very little happens. Long stream-of-consciousness stretches get scanned past rather than read, since “prose as dense and elusive as this” hides whatever point sits underneath. The narrator is characterised as an undereducated, troubled adolescent and then handed the most controlled literary voice in the room, a gap readers keep tripping over. Some file the whole thing as “the literary equivalent of Oscar bait.” Readers finish saying “I admired it, but I didn’t enjoy it.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
