Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
A reissue of the contemporary feminist classic. (Sept.)
Publishers Weekly
Their lives spun off the tilting world like thread off a spindle," says Ruthie, the novel's narrator. The same may be said of Becket Royce's subtle, low-keyed reading. The interwoven themes of loss and love, longing and loneliness-"the wanting never subsided"-require a cool, almost impersonal touch. Royce narrates natural and manmade catastrophe and ruin as the author offers them: with a sort of watery vagueness engulfing extraordinary events. Occasionally this leads Royce to sound sleepy or to glide over humor. But she expresses Ruthie's story without any irksome effort to sound childlike, and she avoids the pitfall of dramatizing other characters, such as the awkward sheriff, the whispery insubstantiality of Aunt Sylvie or the ladies bearing casseroles to lure Ruthie away from Aunt Sylvie and into their concept of normality. Originally published in 1980 and filmed in 1987, Housekeeping is finally on audio because of Robinson's new Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Gilead. The novel holds up remarkably and painfully well, and the language remains searching and sonorous. Anatole Broyard wrote back then: "Here is a first novel that sounds as if the author has been treasuring it up all her life...." And because the author's rhythms, images and diction are so original and dense, this audio is a treasure for listeners who have or haven't read the book. Based on the Picador paperback. (Aug.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Charles McGrath
....The language is so precise, so distilled and so beautiful one does not want to miss any pleasure it might yield up to patience. -- The New York Times Books of the Century
Hamill
An often comic novel that has become a certifiable classic. Her name is Ruth and she has the eye and ear of a poet.
—Hungry Mind Review
From the Publisher
So precise, so distilled, so beautiful that one doesn't want to miss any pleasure it might yield.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Here's a first novel that sounds as if the author has been treasuring it up all her life...You can feel in the book a gathering voluptuous release of confidence, a delighted surprise at the unexpected capacities of language, a close, careful fondness for people that we thought only saints felt.” —Anatole Broyard, The New York Times
“I found myself reading slowly, than more slowly—this is not a novel to be hurried through, for every sentence is a delight.” —Doris Lessing
