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Pif Magazine
ISSN: 1094-2726
Published by:
Pif, LLC
PMB 248
4820 Yelm Hwy SE
Suite B
Lacey, WA 98503-4903
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Endings : Page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
A closing that somehow conveys a sense of summary, inviting us to draw the inference that nothing of import has been overlooked, seems to spread its arms and collect the disparate parts and themes and characters and arrange them for a kind of final appearance. Of course, any closing which does that only thinly is tedious and spiritless in the extreme.
The late John Gardner, with this sort of summarial ending in mind, writes in The Art of Fiction of the novel’s need at its conclusion to return and repeat the re-summoning, the recalling, at the close of the most significant moments readers have encountered along the way.
But to make the point once more, it’s not a matter of simply recalling these moments but of gathering them up in all their apparent randomness and uniting them at the end by underscoring their connections. It’s as though the narrator, the emcee of a variety show, urges all the performers back for one last bow. The closing as a kind of literary encore. And as they return he now points out to the audience how the elephant act relates to the Italian opera singer – the rough translation of the title of her aria is "Pachyderm" – and that the comedian told a joke involving a hippopotamus, another species of pachyderm, who speaks Italian.
This final revelation of influences and connections at the end is what Gardner calls "an organized return of images" and Marilynne Robinson’s novel, Housekeeping closes with just such a scheme of orderly beauty. The narrator, Ruth, having succumbed to the influence of her guardian – her deeply, cripplingly eccentric Aunt Sylvie – and having joined her in a life of sad, nomadic isolation, imagines at the end of the book her only sibling, her sister Lucille. Lucille’s whereabouts are unknown because, in adolescence, she fled Sylvie’s bizarre ways to claim for herself a conventionally stable life.
Here, at the conclusion of the novel, is Ruth:
Or imagine Lucille in Boston, at a table in a restaurant, waiting for a friend. . . Her water glass has left two-thirds of a ring on the table, and she works at completing the circle with her thumbnail. Sylvie and I do not flounce in through the door… We do not sit down at the table next to hers and empty our pockets in a small damp heap in the middle of the table, and sort out the gum wrappers and ticket stubs, and add up the coins and dollar bills, and laugh and add them up again. My mother, likewise, is not there, and my grandmother in her house slippers with her pigtail wagging, and my grandfather, with his hair combed flat against his brow, does not examine the menu with studious interest. We are nowhere in Boston. However Lucille may look, she will never find us there, or any trace or sign . . . No one watching this woman smear her initials in the steam on her water glass with her first finger, or slip cellophane packets of oyster crackers into her handbag for the sea gulls, could know how her thoughts are thronged by our absence, or know how she does not watch, does not listen, does not wait, does not hope, and always for me and Sylvie.
First, and most obviously, note Ruth bringing back the characters for one last glimpsing. Lucille, about whom she muses inventively. Her mother, who committed suicide. Her grandmother, the first inheritor of Ruth and Lucille after their mother’s death. Her grandfather, who’d died years before in a train accident.
Reading Robinson’s closing, one cannot imagine a better example of a narrative achieving a sense of completion, of the circle of story coming closed. You can hear the swell of oracular argument as Ruth moves toward conclusion. But if this is so, it’s essential to ask how the ending of Housekeeping is able to retain such an edgy resonance; how, in other words, Robinson so successfully avoids rendering it inert even as she creates an impression of entirety, the sense that, in conclusion, she’s accounted for everyone and everything.
She accomplishes a great deal, first of all, through the sensory concreteness of Ruth’s speculations; no airy abstractions, but rather hard clean images: thumbnail in the water ring; crackers into a pocket (we hear the crinkling cellophane). And beyond that, Robinson infuses her closing with splendidly nervous life by recasting the very terms of narrative, and in doing so she counters a reader’s instinctive expectations of the way narrative typically speaks.
In other words, we’re accustomed to hearing and reading descriptions of what the characters before us are doing, are thinking, are feeling, and so on. Our picture of them in their moment grows ever clearer with each detail.
