Housekeeping is concerned with much more than the gentle account of the failure of [a] family to survive their battle with [an] insidiously hostile environment. Ruth and Lucille's last guardian, Aunt Sylvie, is given to lonely, eccentric confrontation of the lake [in which her father and her sister drowned]…. The water unmistakably draws her; and she takes Ruth on a wild expedition to a ruined house some miles along the lake shore where she hopes that the ghosts of its dead children might appear to them. And when Lucille leaves the household for a more stable one (to live, symbolically, with her Home Economics teacher), Sylvie takes Ruth away from prying police and solid citizens into the world of transients and drifters. It is implied that this is perhaps better or at least no worse than the precarious Fingerbone community, where "not a soul there but knew how...