Housekeeping

Considered a modern classic, Robinson's novel enjoys a sustained popularity. The story of Ruth and her sister, Lucille, HOUSEKEEPING speaks eloquently of displacement, loss, and longing. Becket Royce has a friendly, inviting voice well-suited to Ruth's long and thoughtful narrations of the story, though she's equally good at creating the voices of Sylvie and Lucille, as well as incidental characters. Robinson's use of language is often challenging and always beautiful; some sentences brim with meaning and metaphoric potential. As an audio production, her prose can challenge listeners' ability to absorb it all, occasionally sending them to the pause button. But the rewards of listening slowly or re-reading provocative passages are worth it. J.C.G. (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine

October 3, 2005
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.