2003: I try the Golden Door Spa, but it feels like famine. While I’m there, I do a silent meditation walk, and before I can stop myself, I’m judging the way people walk. We listen to Dave Matthews as Bobby learns how to drive–Ants Marching, Satellite, Crush, Crash Into Me, Tripping Billies… I take Bobby and Jack and Jack’s friend to Washington, DC for a concert. On Sundays starting at four and before they can do anything else, the boys must wash clothes, fold clothes, put clothes away, take up the trash or recycling, clean their rooms, and get their stuff off the steps. They appear to have so little homework that we impose an hour and a half time period in which they must study or at least read. We are torturing them. In June we go back to Nantucket. Instead of the ferry we fly. I have to take a Xanax before getting into the tiny 10-seater Cape Air plane in which Cal has assured me there will be a co-pilot. There is not. This time Sam has his own bike instead of sharing a bicycle for two with Cal. I return to the New York State Summer Writers Institute for a third year, but I go for the first two weeks and take the workshop with Mary Gordon and Marilynne Robinson. Mary sits on the edge of her desk as she talks about how to “saturate a moment.” Marilynne grins as she tells us she reads while she walks her dog, then she gazes into the air above us and talks about Galileo. There are readings by Francine Prose, Michael Ondaatje, Carolyn Forche, Honor Moore, Robert Pinsky, Claire Messud, Anne Beattie, Mary Gaitskill… I feel like I’m on another planet. No triathlons, but for the 9th year in a row, Amandah and I hike the 23 miles of the Pine Mountain Trail–now with the husbands. Kathleen graduates from college and comes home while she looks for a job. The kids are 22, 16, 14, and 10. This is the year of Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto and a big year for the classics—Middlemarch, The Sound and the Fury, Mrs. Dalloway, and To the Lighthouse.

14 days to 60

~

She sees that she has before her an important task: to understand that all the things that happened in her life happened to her. That she is the same person who was born, was a child, a girl, a young woman, and now she is old. That there is some line running through her body like a wick.

Mary Gordon, The Rest of Life

c

Just as Home, a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award in Fiction, has been called a companion to Gilead, this post is a companion to yesterday’s.  Prompted by comments, I wanted to add that if you enjoyed Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson‘s first novel, you might enjoy Home, her latest.  In style of writing, Home more closely resembles Housekeeping, rather than the epistolary slowness of Gilead.  And in sensibility, compare these two passages: 

From Home: “Glory went up to the attic, the limbo of things that had been displaced from current use but were not in the strict sense useless…Other pious families gave away the things they did not need.  Boughtons put them in the attic, as if to make an experiment of doing without them before they undertook some irreparable act of generosity.”

From Housekeeping:  “Who would think of dusting or sweeping the cobwebs down in a room used for the storage of cans and newspapers–things utterly without value?  Sylvie only kept them, I think, because she considered accumulation to be the essence of housekeeping, and because she considered the hoarding of worthless things to be proof of a particularly scrupulous thrift.”

And notice the covers–and here I admit I often judge a book by its cover–at least for the few seconds before I open it.  See the curtained window on each.  See how Paul is the only Beatle in bare feet.

I wonder if Robinson’s next novel might not take us inside another person’s home in the same place and the same time.  In other words, I wonder how many ways she can tell the same story, which is in fact not the same story.  And with each telling, if she will manage to show how a story we thought complete was in fact not.