In Robinson's novel, housekeeping means different things to different people. To the unconventional, offbeat Sylvie, a free-spirited drifter who arrives to care for her nieces, conventional middle-class notions of housekeeping don't compute. Sylvie marches to her own beat, caring for the girls in her own, odd way. She buys them pretty, sparkly shoes that fall apart quickly, rather than sturdy, sensible ones. She hoards newspapers and doesn't repair things that begin to fall apart. She doesn't feed the girls a healthy, balanced diet. She does share her senses of joy and sorrow with them. She gives them freedom and, rather than sacrificing her life to them, maintains her autonomy, sometimes wandering away for a long time. Lucille, the younger sister of the narrator, Ruth, comes increasingly to reject and hate Sylvie's erratic housekeeping. She wants a completely conventional life and eventually moves in with a "normal" family. Her notion of housekeeping is akin to what you might see on a 1950s sitcom: orderly and repressed. The girls' religious grandmother, who raises them in the early part of the novel, is also conventional in her housekeeping. Robinson questions conventional norms of housekeeping. While the townspeople eventually try to remove the girls from Sylvie, seeing her as unfit, Robinson shows us a quirky but compelling Sylvie, a woman with parenting deficits but also positive qualities. It is a different form of housekeeping. Lucille's very conventional yearnings, while understandable, seem dull and stifling within the context of the novel. Robinson encourages us to interrogate what a home is and what it means to keep one's house. Sometimes, she suggests, the best way to keep house is to burn the house down.
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