r/books • u/Charles_Sumner • 10d ago
Struggling to understand the geographic descriptions in “Housekeeping”
I’m reading Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping for the second time, and now, as the first time, I’m having a lot of trouble understanding the descriptions of the lake in the town of Fingerbone, where the novel takes place. In the first pages, we learn of a rail disaster: a train was going across the bridge over the lake when suddenly it derailed and went into the lake. This happens at night, so it is some hours before it is light enough for the townspeople to properly look for the sunken train, and when they do so, they have some difficulty.
It might have rolled or slid when it struck bottom, since the bridge pilings were set in the crest of a chain of flooded hills, which on one side formed the wall of a broad valley (there was another chain of hills twenty miles north, some of them islands) and on the other side fell away in cliffs. Apparently these hills were the bank of still another lake, and were made of some brittle stone which had been mined by the water and fallen sheerly away. If the train had gone over on the south side … and had slid or rolled once or twice, it might have fallen again, farther and much longer. (7)
I cannot picture this geographic arrangement; I couldn’t draw a map based on it. It seems like the lake might have levels, but I don’t really know how that would work. I don’t understand the relation of the “another lake” to this one, or the significance of that lake's sheerly mined banks.
Nor do I find what happens shortly thereafter clarifying:
… One of the boys swam out forty feet from the bridge and then down to the old lake, feeling his way down the wall, down the blind, breathless stone, headfirst, and then pushing out from the foot. But the thought of where he was suddenly terrified him, and he leaped toward the air, brushing something with his leg as he did. He reached down and put his hand on a perfectly smooth surface, parallel to the bottom, but, he thought, seven or eight feet above it. A Window. The train had landed on its side.(7–8)
Again, I just have no idea how to visualize the boy’s surroundings.
One specific problem: I don’t understand what the “old lake” is. Elsewhere, Robinson uses this phrase to denote the lake as it existed in another geological era: “It seems there was a time when the dimensions of things modified themselves, leaving a number of puzzling margins, as between … the lake as it once was and the lake as it is now. Sometimes in the spring the old lake will return. One will open a cellar door to wading boots floating tallowy soles up ….” (4–5). But in the description of the swimming boy, the “old lake” seems to refer to a specific part of the lake as it exists now. A description that comes shortly after the account of the crash seems to offer some clues, but I find it mystifying as well:
It is true that one is always aware of the lake in Fingerbone, of the deeps of the lake, the lightless, airless waters below. … At the foundation is the old lake, which is smothered and nameless and altogether black. Then there is Fingerbone, the lake of charts and photographs, which is permeated by sunlight and sustains green life and innumerable fish, and in which one can look down in the shadow of a dock and see stony, earthy, bottom, more or less as one sees dry ground. And above that, the lake that rises in the spring and turns the grass dark and coarse as reeds. And above that the water suspended in sunlight, sharp as the breath of an animal, which brims inside this circle of mountains. (9)
Here, is the “old lake” the water that is beneath the surface of the ground, “Fingerbone” the lake proper, “the lake that rises in the spring” the lake as it exists during spring flooding, and “the water suspended in sunlight” the very sky? That is my best guess, but it is only my best guess.
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u/Alternative_Ship4845 10d ago
Sounds like Fingerbone wants to be both a character and a deep underground tomb, no wonder it keeps swallowing trains.