Marilynne Robinson has written a first novel that one reads as slowly as poetry—and for the same reason: The language is so precise, so distilled, so beautiful that one doesn't want to Marilynne Robinson 1944– © Jerry Bauermiss any pleasure it might yield up to patience. Miss Robinson's muse is clearly John Keats, and her theme, like his, the inextricability of pleasure and loss.

What sustains the lyricism of "Housekeeping" is the immovable melancholy of its narrator, a quiet dreamy girl named Ruth who becomes so used to loss so young that she cannot envision clinging to anything more permanent than a moment, a memory or a dream. (p. 14)

The controlled lyricism of Ruth's language, which had been anchored in sensuous detail, becomes unmoored [as tension mounts and the novel nears its end]…. Since Ruth is our narrator, when her imagination becomes fevered and hallucinatory, so does the...