By Marilynne Robinson
Once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.
During the 2020 pandemic, I discovered the 1987 film, Housekeeping, as it was leaving the Criterion Channel at the end of the month. The premise intrigued me: eccentric aunt Sylvie arrives at a small isolated town to care for her orphaned adolescent nieces, Ruth and Lucille. But it was this IMDb user’s review that made me want to watch it in the first place:
This is a film of a rare, intimate perception that is aimed with pinpoint precision at a few unusual characters and the places they inhabit. At first its subjects seem simple, but like many people, these characters are merely shielding themselves, hesitant to reveal much of their real natures except as rare gifts in intimate moments. It must have been tremendously challenging to create and portray natural introverts like these characters… this film certainly wouldn't appeal to everyone, but it is a beautiful and evocative character study that has the courage to deal with personalities, events and emotions too obscure or inaccessible for most mainstream filmmakers. Forsyth deserves credit for having gotten this made in the first place, as well as for the eclectic perception that gave the film its many unique and worthwhile qualities.
Sure enough, I loved the film and was amazed I had never heard of it before (it’s that obscure), but then, this small film would never have been in my radar as a teen in 1987, and if it were, I wouldn't have appreciated it then. My friend Janina told me she remembered seeing a casting call when she was at PW high school, so this film was shot outside Vancouver (even though the town of Fingerbone is supposed to be in Idaho).
Since I loved the film so much, I had to read the book and requested it for my 2021 birthday. And sure enough, I loved the book, too, and I can attest that Bill Forsyth made a wonderfully faithful adaptation of a beautiful novel. It’s one thing to write a compelling narrative about introverts but translating that cinematically was also a real accomplishment. It’s become expected for a movie director to inject their auteur-ness into an adaptation but rarely do people applaud a director for subsuming his ego in service of its literary source and channeling Robinson's voice into his film.
In a way Housekeeping the film was the perfect distillation of an imperfect novel. In reading the novel, I felt that some things were portrayed a little too simplistically, like how the town of Fingerbone was divided between the conformists vs the non-conformists, or too pretentiously as in the writerly prose or biblical references. Also I was a little uncomfortable with how non-conformity was linked to mental illness and/or the inability to deal with reality. Ruth and Lucille’s mother had committed suicide and it was hinted that she may have been bipolar. Sylvie was a fascinating character, but did she have to be so maddeningly impractical? Often she seemed detached from reality, at times even hallucinatory, and yes, it was questionable whether she could provide a stable home for her nieces. I was reminded of the parents in The Glass Castle, who were so non-conformist to the point of severe neglect. And Ruth was so passive, understandably so, but her constant, quiet waiting did get mildly tiresome.
The lake still thundered and groaned, the flood waters still brimmed and simmered. When we did not move or speak, there was no proof that we were there at all. The wind and the water brought sounds intact from any imaginable distance. Deprived of all perspective and horizon, I found myself reduced to an intuition, and my sister and my aunt to something less than that. I was afraid to put out my hand, for fear it would touch nothing, or to speak, for fear no one would answer.
And even when Ruth recognized how much like Sylvie she was, I had the sense that she would always be Sylvie’s shadow. Even though Lucille became more conformist, she at least made a hard and firm decision to leave the Foster house and Sylvie’s sphere of influence for a more normal home.
But the important thing for me was that I was still able to relate to so much in the novel: the jealous rage of the two sisters as they trudged home in the snow looking through the windows of other families’ homes; their feelings of abandonment, loneliness, solitude and need to belong. And the gradual bond that developed between Sylvie and Ruth.
I waited for Sylvie to say, “You’re like me.” I thought she might say, “You’re like your mother.” I feared and suspected that Sylvie and I were of a kind, and waited for her to claim me, but she would not.
I loved how there were many subtle hints that Sylvie was “an unredeemed transient” who was trying to keep house for the sake of her nieces and how her peculiar habits and preferences reveal her previous lifestyle, like sleeping in her clothes, or eating in the dark, or preparing finger foods for dinner.
I remember Sylvie walking through the house with a scarf around her hair, carrying a broom. Yet this was the time that leaves began to gather in the corners… Thus finely did our house become attuned to the orchard and to the particularities of weather, even in the first days of Sylvie’s housekeeping. Thus did she begin by littles and perhaps unawares to ready it for wasps and bats and barn swallows. Sylvie talked a great deal about housekeeping… Sylvie believed in stern solvents, and most of all in air. It was for the sake of air that she opened doors and windows, though it was probably through forgetfulness that she left them open.
Sylvie and Ruth do redeem themselves when their bond becomes threatened by the well-meaning but harmful intervention of Fingerbone townsfolk, and they take serious, if somewhat dramatic, action.
Sylvie did not want to lose me… She did not wish to remember me. She much preferred my simple, ordinary presence, silent and ungainly though I might be. For she could regard me without strong emotion—a familiar shape, a familiar face, a familiar silence. She could forget I was in the room. She could speak to herself, or to someone in her thoughts, with pleasure and animation, even while I sat beside her—this was the measure of our intimacy, that she gave almost no thought to me at all.
But if she lost me, I would become extraordinary by my vanishing.
One main difference in the film was that it ended with Sylvie and Ruth walking on the train bridge away from Fingerbone and they disappear into the dark night, which is a very apropos cinematic ending. In reading the novel, I got a bonus ending, in a sense, with a short chapter which revealed the transient life that Sylvie and Ruth had led several years after fleeing Fingerbone.
Housekeeping was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and was listed by the Guardian as one of the best 100 novels of all time.
