SOURCE: Gies, Judith. Review of Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson. Saturday Review 8, no. 1 (January 1981): 66.

In the following review, Gies lauds Housekeeping as a “sensuous, funny, and mythic” novel.

This extraordinary first novel [Housekeeping] is populated by women and by ghosts. It is narrated by Ruth, who grew up with her younger sister Lucille near the shores of a “bitter, moon-pulled lake” under the care of a series of relatives. The circumstances of their childhood are at once familiar and unfamiliar, like a town seen at night from a moving train.

Conventional Lucille, religiously brushing her hair, struggles to be normal in the face of such mortifications as a peculiar aunt who sleeps on park benches and an adolescent sister whose appearance is “compromised by my ungainliness, my buzzard's hunch.” Sylvie Fisher tries valiantly to take proper care of her sister's children, but she is an eccentric housekeeper, apt to...