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Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping is a poetic ode to transience, also, a gorgeous, feminized riff on Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. To Robinson, it would seem, the earth is a body; glacial lakes are its wounds; and houses are merely shells, transient, storied scabs that crust the edge of things. Decidedly not titled “Houseowning,” Housekeeping reminds the reader that “every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, and finally has come to look and not to buy.” God himself, the narrator Ruth says in one of her Melvillian sermons, was a transient here on earth. “God himself was pulled into the vortex we made when we fell, or so the story goes. And while He was on earth He mended families.”

Robinson’s use of Moby Dick is subtle. The first line “My name is Ruth” is her “Call me Ishmael”—the reader’s first hint. Even there she seems to correct Melville with politeness. Rather than issue a directive, Robinson’s narrator invites us to know her name.

Water imagery is prevalent in the novel. The story is set in the fictional town of Fingerbone, Idaho, a community which nestles around a glacial lake which comes to represent something of a limbo between life and death. The lake claims Ruth’s grandfather, her mother, and hundreds of others. A still, cold lake is the perfect imaginary veneer between here and heaven—in stillness it reflects the sky, after all. Those who die in the lake do so with the same verb, I noticed. These poor souls “sail” into the black depths of the lake. Ruth’s house she shares with a sister and an aunt is time and again likened to a ship: “The house stood out beyond the orchard with every one of its windows lighted. It looked large, and foreign, and contained, like a moored ship—a fantastic thing to find in a garden,” a mentioning which, of course, brings Eden into the fray.

Housekeeping is salted with Old Testament biblical allusions. One particularly revealing line makes reference to the biblical narrative arc of the world: the beginning is expulsion and everything moves against entropy toward the final end in which we hope for reconciliation and return. Ruth and her aunt Sylvie, at the end of the book, have been expelled from their orchard, their garden, their shell, their house, which they burn as they flee, leaving nothing—banking, perhaps on the Biblical line about storing “treasures in heaven, for there will your heart be.”

Love, again and again, in the novel, is declared and shown to be “half a longing that possession does nothing to mitigate.” Love seems to be nothing but a foreshadowing of the unwritten conclusion that “the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries.”

There are no direct dependencies between Housekeeping and Moby Dick; Robinson makes no direct reference to the book or any of its characters. She mimics Melville’s style of poetic prose, and bests it, in my opinion. There is the journey of lost souls. There is a scene in which the main characters are stranded all-night out on the lake in a dilapidated row boat. But Housekeeping is not an adaptation of a classic in the way that A Thousand Acres is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear. Rather, Moby Dick for Robinson seems to be only something of a touchstone, a reliquary, a distorted likeness like a ghosted image of some unsure thing in a broken mirror or an unstill lake, a fragmented memory, isolated and arbitrary as “glimpses one has at night through lighted windows.”