Thank you all, panelists and readers. What a joy it’s been plumbing the fathomless depths of Lake Fingerbone these past two weeks, and with such a thoughtful, engaged crew of fellow obsessives. We may not have found Grandpa Foster’s derailed train, but I’m pretty sure that’s the only secret the lake didn’t surrender to our close analysis.

For readers who haven’t discovered Marilynne Robinson’s second novel, “Gilead” (2005), I urge you to pick it up. It more than fulfills the promise of “Housekeeping.” And for those who have read “Gilead,” and who worried they might have to wait another 25 years for Robinson’s next novel, I’m pleased to say that “Home” will arrive in September. A companion to “Gilead,” the new book focuses on the life of John Ames’s closest friend, the Rev. Robert Boughton.

In bidding farewell to “Housekeeping,” I want to end where we began: with its language. “Lyrical” is a bad word here at the Book Review — because it’s so overused as to be meaningless, and because it’s so often attached to writing that’s overwrought, self-indulgent, filigreed to no purpose. To be honest, I know plenty of people who have leveled those accusations against “Housekeeping.” So if nothing else I hope we’ve demonstrated that Robinson’s filigrees always have a purpose, or several: her sentences are like tiny depth charges packed with references both internal and external. As Allan wrote in his final post, “Nothing is accidental in this book so long in the making.”

At the end of our first week, our reader Mark Valentine invited people to identify a favorite sentence from “Housekeeping.” Only a couple of us took him up on it, so I’ll leave you all by repeating the challenge: in a book so dense with rich language, which sentence (or passage) would you single out for special attention?

We’ll be back soon to announce our next Reading Room selection. Until then: stay tuned, read something good, and thanks again to all of you for joining us.

After my book “Dakota” was published, I received many letters from people who had roots in the western Plains. In one, a woman whose grandparents had been neighbors of my mother’s family when she was a girl asked, “Can you tell me if my grandmother committed suicide?” Her family name was familiar to me, but the story was not. When I jogged my mother’s memory, she recalled a few details. The woman was much younger than her husband, and had endured a difficult pregnancy. One day she disappeared in Bismarck, N.D., some 130 miles away. Some of her clothing was found piled on the banks of the Missouri River, but there was no suicide note. My mother said that her parents were not alone in suspecting that the woman had run away.

Rereading “Housekeeping,” I am powerfully reminded of how much my understanding of the book is colored by my experience of life in an isolated town in the American West. So many people are recognizable: the portly sheriff, awkward and embarrassed in the presence of women, and “little old Miss Royce” armed for confrontation with Sylvie in her “church clothes … the brown box suit with the salmon-pink bow at the throat.” The literary insights people have brought to our discussion are a joy to me and enhance my love of the book, but I am also forced to admit that I tend to see “Housekeeping” not so much as fiction as as a record of what really goes on “out there,” in fly-over country. There are so many undercurrents beneath the surface normality, so many women and men who come and go and even disappear, discarding their names along with their families. Their descendants may have picked up a story or two, but are left wondering what happened to them. How we need our Marilynne Robinsons to reimagine them, and give witness to their stories.

Becky Sinkler in her final post wrote in such an eloquent and timely fashion about mothers. Missing mothers abound in “Housekeeping,” but I’ve found myself thinking these last couple of days about siblings.

The story of the good sibling and the bad sibling — Cain and Abel — is such an old one and such a potent one. Besides being daughters, both Sylvie and Ruth are siblings, and for Ruth, at least, the relationship with her sister is the primary one for the first half of the novel. As Allan points out, Lucille is named for light, not necessarily a good thing in the world of “Housekeeping.” By the end of the novel I realized I’d almost forgotten that Lucille wasn’t always, or always so clearly, the conventional sister.

Going back to Chapter 5, I discovered that Ruth had won a prize for attendance in the last year of her grandmother’s life. And indeed it is Lucille who first lures her into truancy. After being accused of cheating on a test, Lucille feigns various illnesses and stops going to school for a week. She plans to return until she reads Sylvie’s note excusing her absence: “I did not call the doctor, because she always seemed quite well by 9:30 or 10:00 in the morning.” Lucille announces that she’s going down to the lake instead, and Ruth accompanies her.

A few days later they are still, once again, playing truant by the lake when they see Sylvie walking out onto the bridge. “If you fell,” Lucille tells her afterwards, “everyone would think you did it on purpose. Even us.” Both girls realize, shockingly, that they can no longer avoid the knowledge that their aunt is not a stable person.

For a little longer, Ruth tells us, Lucille remains “loyal” to her and Sylvie, but the end is in sight. Neither sister can help being the way she is. Still, I can’t help noticing the bias of Ruth’s remark. What about her being loyal to her oldest and truest allegiance: Lucille? What about her trying to accommodate Lucille’s longings for clothes, friends, normal conversation?

Perhaps all great novels work, in part, by making readers oblivious to certain questions. “Housekeeping” makes us forget all kinds of things — work, home, marriage, stability, a warm bed — and indeed makes us sympathize instead with two women who want none of those things and who question the very wanting in others. But the novel ends up paying its due to Lucille, for there she is at the end, poignantly invoked in her helpless waiting, another woman who must bear the weight of absence. And in that final realization of the long shadow cast by sisterly affections surely lies one aspect of this novel’s greatness.

There is a dream most mothers have, a nightmare really. It goes like this: you are away somewhere, and you remember you have left your children at home, perhaps for a week, and haven’t fed them. You can’t get back to them. Or it could be a litter of puppies or kittens other stand-ins for children, but you have lost or neglected to feed them, or they are in a storm, or you have rolled over in bed and smothered them. It’s a frantic nightmare and it recurs, for some of us, throughout our lives. My daughter and I laugh at the nightmare together, conceding that it must have something to do with our mothering skills, which we both accept as erratic.

There are three mothers in “Housekeeping”: Grandmother Sylvie, Helen and Sylvie herself, surrogate or mystical replacement. (Lucille’s Mrs. Royce is a surrogate, but less fully imagined and I won’t consider her here.)

The elder Sylvie is the closest we get to textbook mothering. After the death of her husband, her daughters become suffocatingly dependent on her, but she doesn’t mind. (She’s a kind of Mrs. Ramsay, if you remember V. Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse.”) The years with her husband gone and her girls to herself were “years of almost perfect serenity.” And what does she get for her perfect motherhood? The girls, who are the ones ultimately suffocated, light out for the territory. After all, “she had never taught them to be kind to her.”

(Grandmother Sylvie has the mother nightmare, incidentally: “She dreamed that she had seen a baby fall from an airplane and had tried to catch it in her apron, and once that she had tried to fish a baby out of a well with a tea strainer.”)

She’s a not-so-perfect mother to her granddaughters, but a good-enough mother, as the saying goes, and you get the feeling that when she “eschews waking up” it’s out of the kind of exhaustion known only to grandparents obliged by ties of blood to raise their own grandchildren.

Then there is Helen, who kills herself, leaving her girls on the family porch with that box of graham crackers to “prevent conflict and restlessness”! If the book is Ruth’s coming-of-age story, perhaps the pivotal moment comes in Chapter 10, in the hide-and-seek scene in the orchard, where she is so panicked at being separated from Sylvie that she forces herself not to feel the fear, and brings on her own doom in the form of the sheriff’s intervention.

As its title suggest, “Housekeeping” starts by seeming to engage the niceties of human domestic order; but the word soon hints how hard it is to “keep” much of anything. Not simply our purchase on mere real estate, but our grasp on any assurance that is real, lasting. When Lucille defects, it is natural she would turn to a teacher of Home Economics with its stalwart complacent reassurances.

In a work like Forster’s beautiful “Howards End,” a house becomes a nation and a bulwark, the one certainty in the face of death and changing social orders. Robinson’s sieve of a house withholds even that consolation. The adjoining orchard is not an anchor but an eddy. The house itself is as chafed and waterlogged as it denizens and, therefore, as worthy of meditation.

“Sylvie,” with her sylvan name (as Steve has noted), is the woods come indoors only briefly. Sylvie, for all her strangeness, lives at ease with chaos. She is at times like some water bug skirting along overtop the flooded underworld.

“Ruth” (as beckert has noted) is called after that biblical paragon who cleaves to her beloved mother-in-law, “wither thou goest.” Ruth stands ready to follow a best-loved female relation anywhere on earth at any cost.

“Lucille” is light, with all its truth-tellings, all its uneasy klieg light revelations. Nothing is accidental in this book so long in the making.

The book is about far more than our dual citizenship in the spiritual and natural worlds. In it we feel concurrently the realm of ghosts and the permeable assurance of matter itself. Those ghostly children on the stone shore are, in their way, more original than the lakeside phantoms from Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw.” We find Robinson’s characters learning to thread their tentative way between the formal and the feral. This family’s relation to the town begins as tenuous, and dissolves from there.

Few modern books are more suitable for study. While seeming a family history, Robinson’s work catechizes itself into a strange metaphysic. Water seeks its own level and, in this floating masterpiece, so does meaning.

At its beginning, the work simulates folk art. The opening states the characters’ relations: “My name is Ruth. I grew up with my younger sister, Lucille, under the care of my grandmother…” The work starts with the simplicity of a country gravestone.

Similarly, the grandfather’s painted portraits of mountains in all seasons, animaled and not, sound innocent as Eden. But the touch of the novelist herself proves so sophisticated, so elegant in it compacting wit, we soon guess this innocence for the starting trope it is. The grandfather’s yen for heights precedes the Fall itself. And, just as that silent train leaps weasel-like off its midnight bridge, the novel soon plunges us to depths that, at least at first, seem a jolting fun-ride downward. Then a certain wondrous dread sets in.

I had to laugh when I was awakened in my apartment yesterday to a bathroom flood. It was clean water (unlike the heavy-laden waters of Lake Fingerbone) overflowing the toilet tank, and it was a relatively simple matter to turn off the valve and use every towel I own to mop up the mess. But few things make a person feel so helpless as water that won’t stop running over things one takes for granted, like floors. I wondered at the time if this was punishment for messing with Marilynne Robinson’s fine novel.

We’ve mentioned the religious symbolism in the book, and Becky’s reference to Emily Dickinson spurs me to tackle the subject of biblical allusions. Dickinson is by far my favorite 19th-century biblical interpreter — much more fun than those German scholars — and Robinson shares with Dickinson an easy, playful way with Scripture. One favorite is Dickinson’s comment in a letter that “Consider the lilies — is the only commandment I ever obeyed.”

In “Housekeeping,” Ruth envisions heaven as “a place where I have always known I would not be comfortable.” This may be an allusion to Dickinson’s “Why do they shut me out of Heaven? / Did I sing — too loud?” which itself alludes to Psalm 33: “Sing to the Lord a song that is new / play loudly, with all your skill.”

Robinson also reminds me of Dickinson in the way that she freely appropriates biblical imagery to tell a personal story. Ruth’s observation, for example, that “If one is lost on the water, any hill is Ararat.” Like Dickinson, Robinson is a master of the unforgettable statement that makes the ancient story come alive: “Cain killed Abel, and the blood cried out from the ground — a story so sad that even God took notice of it.” And there is one Dickinsonian image that I’m sure would have delighted the poet. As Ruth and Sylvie walk the bridge in the dark, Ruth notes that the stars above them are “dim as dust in their Babylonian multitudes.”

There is so much more. Two of the great unnamed women of Scripture, the wives of Lot and of Noah, are significant figures in “Housekeeping.” Two women who are named in the Gospels, Martha and Mary, are not mentioned in the book, but might be seen as models for Lucille and Ruth. The biblical allusions that Tim Guirl found scattered like buckshot in the novel reach a crescendo toward the end of the book, as Ruth’s situation becomes more dire and also more clear. Sylvie’s coat envelops Ruth, smelling of camphor and incense. On the next page it is evident that this is an allusion to Christ’s burial clothes, and that we’ve entered holy ground. Ruth declares, “I wore her coat like beatitude, and her arms around me were as heartening as mercy.”