opening Marilynne Robinson's *Housekeeping*...

     Housekeeping opens with a seemingly simple sentence:

     'My name is Ruth.'

Now, she did not say, 'Call me Ruth.' That would be too obvious. No, we get the simple declaration. I'll have more to say about that in later posts. For now, let's move on to the second, vastly more complex sentence.

'I grew up with my younger sister, Lucille, under the care of my grandmother, Mrs. Sylvia Foster, and when she died, of her sisters-in-law, Misses Lily and Nona Foster, and when they fled, of her daughter, Mrs. Sylvia Fisher.'

Well now, that's a tangle. Ruth maps out here a genealogy of a sort we should be familiar with, say, from the Book of Ruth itself (pay heed), or the opening of Matthew's Gospel. Let's work this out, for without clarity here, we'll be lost forever.
     We have Ruth, yes, and her younger sister Lucille. Right.
     First, they're 'under the care' of Mrs. Sylvia Foster, their grandmother (though Ruth refers to her as 'my grandmother', a curious singularity that will surely reveal its significance in time).
     Mrs. Sylvia Foster dies, as folks are wont to do.
     Then the two sisters pass to the sisters-in-law of Mrs. Sylvia Foster. These two, Misses Lily and Nona Foster, flee the scene at some point we have not yet encountered.
     After their departure, the two sisters pass to the daughter of Mrs. Sylvia Foster, one Mrs. Sylvia Fisher.
     I have kept their titles (Misses, Mrs.), for it is important to remember their relations.
     Next, we learn that the sisters remained through all this in the same house, the very house in fact built by Mrs. Sylvia Foster's husband Edmund. He is absent from the story because he 'escaped this world years before I entered it.' See how significant that 'Mrs.' becomes? She is long since a widow, and remains Mrs. Sylvia Foster. Because nothing Ruth says is careless or accidental, that surely signifies something important about Ruth's perceptions of the world of relations into which she was born.
     We immediately learn more about him, but my concern right now is with the precision of Ruth's delineation of her own relations. This precision will remain a particular, not to say peculiar, trait throughout the story she tells. What's more, that singularity, something dare I say that Ruth shares with one Emily Dickinson, will remain a key to her perceptions.
     So, we're just three sentences into the story, and already it has unfolded many strands of significance and beauty. We have learned much about Ruth. First, we know she has a sense of biblical grandeur about her. The story she will tell is subtly woven into the larger story of the Patriarchs, Prophets, Apostles, and all the mighty men, and all the more crucial dear reader, the mighty women of the old old story of God's dealings with his people. Second, we sense a canniness about her: we are seeing the world through the lens of a singular mind; here perception is, as Robinson will put it in an essay on Cauvin, akin to metaphysics.
     We still have 217 pages and many, many more sentences yet to hear. What will they tell us?