Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson

I have dwelt on this sequence of stories, one after another, exploring the ways in which the faithfulness of God is manifest in the world of fallen humankind. This kind of interpretation might seem ingenious and little more if there were not essential truths lying behind it. The first of these is that these divine likenesses among whom we live are of the highest interest and value to God. We have been given the coin of wealth to barter among ourselves for the things we need or want. We assign worth to persons, consciously or not, and then to prestige and property and ease, all the things that compete so successfully with the claims of justice and righteousness, kindness, and respect, which would follow from a true belief that anyone we encounter is an image of God. and the second is that we do not know how to judge or where to blame because events are working themselves out at another scale and toward other purposes more than we can begin to grasp.

I had the good fortune to be able to see Marilynne Robinson speak about her now book, Reading Genesis, at the New York Public Library last week. Robinson is, to me, a living avatar of wisdom. She looks wise, with her leonine gray hair and bearing; she sounds wise, with her quiet and well-measured statements. Reading Genesis, which might be described as a work of theology, seems to me a part of that old and forgotten tradition called wisdom literature, of which Robinson herself perhaps is the last and greatest living practitioner.

Robinson begins by observing that it is trendy to pick Genesis apart. A common viewpoint holds that it is the work of many authors, and that each author's particular political or cultural agenda can be traced in the text. In this way, the text is deconstructed and falls apart; it is a text at odds with itself. So the first thing that Robinson does that is quietly radical--in our times at least--is to read Genesis as a single text, with themes and ideas that animate it from beginning to end. For me, too, this was rather radical, because even growing up in the evangelical church, I don't think I was ever asked to read Genesis, or any book, from beginning to end. I know all the stories here, but seeing them laid out as a single narrative made me understand that I'd been missing something fundamental by dealing with them piecemeal.

What does animate Genesis? For Robinson, it is that fundamental truth which lies at the heart of scripture: that human beings are at the heart of creation. Robinson makes much of comparisons with Babylonian and other Near Eastern literature, like Gilgamesh, many of which have been taken as the "sources" from which Genesis stories, like the flood and the tower of Babel, have been borrowed. But Robinson points out that in these stories, the gods have a tense, inimical relationship with human beings, whose sacrifices they must have in order to eat. The God of Genesis, of course, does not eat; he does not need human beings, yet he created them and the world for their purpose and enjoyment. Genesis is a creation story, and one that places mankind at the center of everything. It's a story that unfolds in the lives of very ordinary people, shepherds like Abraham, Isaac, Joseph; it's through these humble people that God will create a chosen lineage, and through this lineage with which he communes with the entire world. (She asserts also that the family trees of Genesis clearly show that Gentiles are more closely related to the chosen people than one might think; in Genesis, we are all neighbors.)

The other big theme that animates Genesis for Robinson is mercy. She takes exception to the image of the raging, vengeful Old Testament God, and the belief common even among Christians that the God of the New Testament is somehow a different character. Look, for example, at the story of Cain: God spares Cain's life for the killing of his brother, and the famous "mark" that is placed upon his forehead is not actually one of shame, but a kind of protection; it demonstrates that wherever Cain goes he is to be protected from those who wish to slay him for his misdeeds. Cain is the ancestor of the human race, and by saving him from what he deserves--punishment for his murder of Abel--a greater purpose is worked. Robinson notes that this kind of story is told over and over again; characters in Genesis are made to suffer far less than we might think they deserve: Noah, Isaac, the brothers of Joseph.

I often wonder who Robinson writes for. Her firm Calvinism puts her out of step with most of the secular world, and her understanding of scripture certainly doesn't seem to fit in with that of Christian America; I can't imagine Reading Genesis on an endcap at Lifeway, if Lifeway still exists. And yet, the room at NYPL was packed with people who came to enjoy her wisdom. She speaks to some much deeper need in us, I think, to understand the way in which we ourselves are part of a universe that has only become stranger and less familiar in the age of the Big Bang. 

Jack by Marilynne Robinson

Della was speaking to him sometimes in his thoughts, or she was quiet, simply there at the edge of his vision. In her gentle way she was making everything easier. What would she find becoming him? That was what he did. And by putting himself in the way of survival, not to put too fine a point on it, he was doing as she had asked him to do, so forthrightly. Can these bones live? Oh, Lord, you know. But for you, Miss Miles, I am eating this sandwich, for you I am smiling at this stranger, for you I am trying to sleep. He could not imagine an occasion when she might acknowledge any of this. No matter. Their lives were parallel lines that would not meet, he knew that, he would see to that. But they defined each other, somehow. Equidistance was like silence. It had to be carefully sustained to exist at all.

Few books have disappointed me as much as Marilynne Robinson's Home. Coming after the mystical Housekeeping and the elegiac, ruminant Gilead, it felt maudlin and suffocating, even as it covered some of the same ground as Gilead. The problem, I think--or one of them--was that its prodigal son, Jack Boughton, was never quite prodigal enough. The entire novel is constructed around the question of whether Jack can be forgiven and reintegrated into the life of his father's home, but Jack himself never seemed like a problem: he was too weepy, too philosophical, to really push the limits of forgiveness convincingly, despite whatever misdeeds were in his past. When I heard that Robinson was returning to the character of Jack in this new novel, I was both apprehensive and optimistic: it might be another bore, but it might also be a chance to make Jack's travails more convincing.

Jack follows the title character in the events just prior to Home (and Gilead, I think?), a period in which he's bumming around St. Louis. He meets a black schoolteacher named Della, and they fall deeply in love, having principally in common the fact that they both talk like an essay by Marilynne Robinson. But Jack's love for Della is dangerous, even illegal; it means not only gossip and approbation but the possibility of being dismissed from her job at an illustrious school for black students and a break with her family, led by her father, a black separatist bishop from Memphis. Jack, whose history, as we know, includes the "corruption" of a young girl in Iowa with whom he fathered a child, has committed himself to "harmlessness," and his love for Della is anything but harmless.

For me, Jack succeeds where Home largely failed. It provides a convincing portrait of Jack as a someone who thinks very little of himself and a great deal about others, but who seems to bring chaos to their lives even still. At times this quality even takes on a kind of comic aspect, as in a strange moment when he agrees to put on the uniform of a cemetery gardener, only to realize later that the gardener is on the lam and trying to frame him for some obscure misdeed, or when he gets thrown in prison for having stolen property in his pocket--dropped there by a pickpocket panicking at the sight of the cop on the corner. These episodes are droll, but they are intimations of the darker facts of Jack's life, in which is good intentions have all turned sour. Though Jack's love for Della and his love for her are never in question, Jack spends much of the novel pursuing and abandoning her, unable to overcome the quite reasonable belief that his love is a threat or a poison.

I'm actually not surprised that Jack was notably panned in the New York Times this week by Dwight Garner, who finds Robinson's prose "airless." She has a love for abstract nouns that seems to me uniquely Protestant, insofar as Protestantism must construct a faith without the material comfort of the real presence; in Robinson's novels drama works less on the street or in the mind than in the soul, which is the realest thing there is, as Della tells the atheist Jack:

"We all have souls, true?"

He laughed. "Please go on."

"We do. We know this, but just because it's a habit to believe it, not because it is really visible to us most of the time. But once in a lifetime, you look at a stranger and you see a soul, a glorious presence out of place in the world. And if you love God, every choice is made for you. There is no turning away. You've seen the mystery--you've seen what life is about. What it's for. And a soul has no earthly qualities, no history among the things of this world, no guilt or injury or failure. No more than a flame would have. There is nothing to be sad about it except that it is a holy human soul. And it is a miracle when you recognize it."

The other side of this quality is that the novel can seem spectral when you want most for it to be down to earth. It's a novel, after all, about an interracial relationship under Jim Crow, and it's set across more than one black church across the urban heartland of America. Robinson gives the reader numerous black churchmen and churchwomen, tenderly and thoughtfully written, including Della's father, who is gracious to Jack even as he tells him that he will disown Della if she marries him, and yet something of the possible immiseration and violence--the real material stakes of the decision Jack and Della are making--seems just beyond the novel's grasp.

Actually, maybe what the novel is missing most is a sense of anger: why should Della and Jack, two perfectly matched people, not be permitted to be together? I'm reminded of the long digression in Gilead about the Reverend Ames' ancestor who fought for abolition. But that's a different family, and not so much like this pair of dreamers, whose challenge is to accept that the promise of love can outweigh the fear of ruin. Jack's character and situation are unique, but we all must embrace the fact that to love another person grants the power, not always voluntarily wielded, to harm them. Though Jack never quite captures the drama of the soul as powerfully as Gilead or Lila, it is compassionate and a little sweet.

What Are We Doing Here? by Marilynne Robinson

Beauty is grandly present in the architecture of the cosmos, minutely present in the structure of the atom, and yet we humans can seem capable of utter indifference to it.  But I have begun to feel that our ability to do wrong is the basis of our moral nature, that our bias toward error gives meaning and urgency to our seeking after truth, that our blindnesses make the beautiful, pervasive as it is, always an object of discovery, a thing to be yearned for.  Just as the norms of our experience of existence are radically untypical of the universe of Being we can reasonably infer, with its entanglements and indeterminacies, its dark matter and antigravity, so we are singular among creatures precisely in our capacity to refine and elaborate our understanding in the awareness of its shortfall.  It is this in us that has made tiny blue earth a singular, seraphic presence in the great cosmos, watching and pondering, rapt with wonder.  We can feel deficiency in what we know or do, we can hear inadequacy in our most painfully considered phrases.  And gracious and chimerical beauty will bless us with the certainty that there is more to be hoped for, more to be tried.  The theologian can say all this implies divine intention and also continuous, loving engagement.  Because God created the universe, humankind is at the center of it all.

I was listening to a quartet of students in my Creative Writing class the other day complain about their English classes.  What's the point of it, they wanted to know.  They felt simultaneously that the things they were asked to do, like literary analysis, were too demanding and not rigorous enough, that they were asked to see what was not there while ignoring the skills that might actually be useful.  I didn't say anything.  For one, I was flattered that they felt comfortable enough to have that conversation when I was sitting right next to them.  For another, I feel, perhaps ironically, that those kind of conversations are exactly the ones that a good English or Humanities curriculum ought to make possible.  I didn't feel that I could articulate that to them in that moment in a way that wouldn't overwhelm the conversation they were having.  I also did not feel that I could pull out Marilynne Robinson's new collection of lectures, What Are We Doing Here? and find the passage I really wanted to share with them.  But I've found it, and I share it with you:

The contemporary assault on the humanities has something of the same objective and would employ similar methods.  Workers, a category that seems to subsume us all except the idlest rich, should learn what they need to learn to be competitive in the new economy.  All the rest is waste and distraction.

Competitive with whom?  On what terms?  To what end?  With anyone whose vigor and good fortune allows them to prosper, apparently.  And will these competitors of ours be left to enjoy the miserable advantage of low wages and compromised health?  And is there any particular reason to debase human life in order to produce more, faster, without reference to the worth of the product or to the value of the things sacrificed to its manufacture?  Wouldn't most people, given an hour or two to reflect, consider this an intolerably trivial use to be put to, for them and their children?  Life is brief and fragile, after all.  Then what is this new economy whose demands we must always be ready to fill?  We may assume it will be driven by innovation and by what are called market forces, which can be fads or speculation or chicanery.  Oh yes, rowdy old capitalism.  Let it ply its music.  Then again, in the all-consuming form proposed for it now, it is a little like those wars I mentioned earlier.  It is equally inimical to poetry, eloquence, memory, the beauty of wit, the fires of imagination, the depth of thought.  It is equally disinclined to reward gifts that cannot be turned to its uses.  The urgency of war or crisis has been brought to bear on our civil institutions, which is to say, on the reserves and resources of civility we have created over many generations.

The answer I would give my students is not an answer but a question: what are your Math and Science classes "good for?"  I don't meant to diminish those fields, and neither does Robinson, who makes repeated allusions to the twentieth century's great scientific discoveries.  But we never ask the question what those classes are good for because we think we know: they help us get jobs, to be competitive, whether on the personal or national scale, and to make money.  The intuitive leap from the money to the happiness goes unsaid, even as we say we believe that money can't buy happiness.  But Chemistry and Biology and Algebra won't tell you how to cope when you wake up in the middle of the night with your wife or husband beside you in a California King bed in your beautiful, well-apportioned home and wonder why you feel so deeply unsatisfied.  A painting or a book or a poem might help you, or it might help you understand why and how such a thing could come to pass, or it might merely give you a kind of satisfaction that has eluded you.  We find it difficult to think of art as an end rather than a means, even as we take it as evidence of a flourishing culture.

The "here" in Robinson's title is the university.  But it serves also for the cosmos.  The questions, why are we here at school, and why are we here in the universe, are not unrelated.  Robinson holds up the American university system, with its roots in the Puritan belief that education is for all people, as an institution created in accordance with the basic worth of the human being.  That's her big subject: the special position of the human being in the universe, a quality which she reveals as self-evident despite the many millennia we have spent trying to diminish or conceal that fact.  She offers up old-time religion as a mode of thinking that accommodates this special position, at odds with the positivism and determinism that have characterized 20th-century thinking.  She saves a special rage for the attitudes, like Freudianism, Darwinism, and neurobiology, which would eliminate ideas of the soul or the mind, and thus, she feels, the human being.  I'm not sure I agree with the particulars all the time (Freud gets dragged a little too much these days, I think) but the central argument seems to me to be one of the truest things I have ever read.

All this sounds familiar because it's the same general thrust of her last collection of essays, The Givenness of Things.  If it's repetitive, I don't mind; most of it bears repeating.  What Are We Doing? is repetitive within itself.  As a series of lectures given at disparate moments, a pattern of key ideas begins to emerge.  It will be difficult to forget, after reading these, that no one was put to death under Oliver Cromwell for religious reasons, or that Einstein's remark that the universe is remarkable in the fact that we can comprehend it ought to suggest that we are equally remarkable.  Robinson hammers especially hard a point that she begins making in Givenness, that the Puritans are in need of a critical and cultural rehabilitation.  I spent too much time in graduate school writing about John Milton to disagree with that.

With Robinson, it's hard to complain about more of the same because the same comes from a place that strikes me as deeply wise.  What this collection adds to the previous might be a knife's-edge awareness of our particular historical moment.  Besides the full-throated defense of the American university, there's an encomium to President Obama, who famously interview Robinson a few years ago.  There's a single reference to Trump, at the end, and it's a dismissal of theories of Russian collision.  But there's no ignoring her critique of nativists, "these lovers of country, these patriots," who "are wildly unhappy with the country they claim to love and are bent on remaking it to suit their own preferences, which they feel no need to justify or even fully articulate."  And the final lecture, called "Slander," Robinson tells the story of how her mother's obsession with Fox News caused them to be alienated from one another.  "She went to her rest before she would have had to deal with the ignominy of my conversation with the president," Robinson writes.  What a deeply sad sentence to have to write.  But it underscores the ways in which a return to the humanist ideals of our early modern forebears might present an antidote to our parochialism, our fear, our ennui, and our profound feelings of diminution.

The Givenness of Things by Marilynne Robinson

The fact, or at least the degree, of human exceptionalism is often disputed.  In some quarters it is considered modest and seemly for us to take our place among the animals, conceptually speaking--to acknowledge finally the bonds of kinship evolution implies.  Yet, in view of our history with regard to the animals, not to mention our history with one another, it seems fair to wonder if the beasts, given a voice in the matter, would not feel a bit insulted by our intrusion.  History is the great unfinished portrait of old Adam.  In the very fact of having a history we are unique.  And when we look at it we are astonished.  Only in myth or nightmare could another such creature be found.  What a thing is man.

Say, however, that God is a given, the God of the psalmist and of Jesus.  Then it is possible to claim a dignity for humankind that is assured because it is bestowed on us, that is, because it is beyond even our formidable powers to besmirch and destroy.  Say that the one earthly thing God did not put under our own feet was our own essential nature.  The one great corrective to our tendency toward depredation would be a recognition of our abiding sacredness, since we are both, and often simultaneously, victim and villain.  The divine image in us, despite all, is an act of God, immune to our sacrilege, apparent in the loveliness that never ceases to shine out in incalculable instances of beauty and love and imagination that make the dire assessment of our character, however solidly grounded in our history and our prospects, radically untrue.

I believe in God, and with some trepidation I will admit that I consider myself a Christian.  I don't say that often, and I can recall clearly several instances in which people I know otherwise quite well have been shocked to hear it.  Mostly I keep it to myself, partly because I don't want to be associated with a religious culture that feels to me increasingly shallow, mindless, and vicious.  (Robinson talks about "the growing numbers among our people who have begun to reject [Christianity] as ignorant, intolerant, and belligerently nationalistic, as they might reasonably conclude that it is, if they hear only the loudest voices.")  Partly because a belief in God is increasingly difficult to defend under the hyperrationalist terms that characterize our century.  Partly it is just good, old-fashioned shame.

Robinson's new collection of essays, The Givenness of Things, addresses all of my misgivings directly.  But it's the lack of shame about her that captivates me most; the lack of any sheepishness or need to apologize for this belief.  Robinson happily identifies herself as a throwback, a mainline Protestant with a fondness for the language and ideas of hymnals and prayer books, at a time when that seems an endangered species:

There is a word that fell like a curse on American religious culture--"relevance."  Any number opf assumptions are packed into this word, for example, that the substance and the boundaries of a life can be known, and that they should not be enriched or expanded beyond the circle of the familiar, the colloquial.  We encouraged ourselves to believe that our own small, brief lives were the measure of all things.  Wisdom would have told us that our lives are indeed small and brief, like the billiosn that preceded them and the billions that will follow, but this information was precisely not welcome.  Wisdom would have told us, too, that, by grace of our extraordinary gifts, and theirs, we are heirs to the testimonies of unnumbered generations.  But these gifts, of course, failed the test of relevance, which was a narrow and ungenerous standard, systematically unforgiving of anything that bore the marks of another age, era, or decade.

The Givenness of Things is divided into a number of essays with short titles that promise reflections on broad, if profound topics, like "Grace," "Fear," and "Metaphysics."  The first chapter, "Humanism," recently published in The Nation, shows that each can stand alone.  But the book is really a single essay, with a few key themes that Robinson hits again and again.

First, she objects to rationalist and positivist ways of thinking which deny the reality of much of human experience.  Neuroscience, for example, tries to reduce the very essence of our being to a series of physical, chemical, and electrical interactions, but this is a definition of the real which lops off, wholesale, thousands of years of human culture and learning.  "Our realism," she writes, "distracts us from reality, that most remarkable phenomenon."  But Robinson is far from anti-science; rather, she argues that positivists ignore the implication that the last century of scientific progress have led us to: that our old "nuts-and-bolts physics" is thoroughly insufficient to describe the world.  "The antidote to our gloom," she writes, "is to be found in contemporary science," not least because the strangeness of the new vision of the cosmos--with its multiple dimensions, dark matter, and quantum entanglement--have resurrected the need for a metaphysics that positivism sought to bury.

Second, she argues that we have made a great mistake by removing human beings from the center of the cosmos.  She puts the lie to the humanism of those "secular humanists" who diminish the uniqueness of the human being:

A number of times I have read or heard from the scientists and the rationalists that the brain is a peice of meat.  This being true of the brain, then the brain/mind, the mind/soul, are degraded or dismissed by their being revealed in their actual, brutish nature.  But why limit this insight to the brain?  The entire human person is meat, except where it is bone, no enhancement.  If it is reasonable to say the brain is meat, it is reasonable on the same grounds, the next time you look into a baby carriage, to compliment the mother on her lovely little piece of meat.  I could as reasonably say that pieces of meat come to my classes, sit in the chairs, and gaze at me with something that looks for all the world like interest or indifference.  Whatever else might be said of these living hams and chops and ribs, they seem to bore easily...

More to the point, what is meat?  Complex life.  And what is that?  The universe's greatest mystery.  It is meat that sings and flies and fledges, meat that makes civilizations and pulls them down.

Robinson labors over this point again and again, because as moderns we have trouble believing it, though it seems, by the time she's done, entirely self-evident.  "Our brilliance," she writes, "has shown us grounds for utter humility.  We could vanish into the ether like a breath, leaving nothing behind to say who we were, what we were.  No doubt we will vanish in fact, mere transients in a cosmos that will realize itself over eons.  How astonishing that we know this."  That is, those rationalists who show us how small and insignificant we are in relation to the cosmos often take the wrong lesson, for no ape, bird, plant, or stone has any conception of what its relationship to the cosmos is, or can even conceive of a cosmos.  Even our immense capacity for evil sets us apart, because "[t]here is something inversely godlike in our potential de-creation of the biosphere."

Finally, she argues that the exceptionalism of the human being is at the heart of Christianity.  The book, toward its end, becomes a theological defense of Robinson's conception of Christianity and of Calvinism.  She speaks beautifully and persuasively about the meaning of the Incarnation, which, she argues, isn't so much God taking on a human form as an expression of the way in which human beings, and Being itself, share and have always shared the nature of God:

I have spent all this time clearing the ground so that I can say, and be understood to mean, without reservation, that I believe in a divine Creation, and in the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the Holy Spirit, and the life to come.  I take the Christian mythos to be a special revelation of a general truth, that truth being the ontological centrality of humankind in the created order, with its theological corollary, the profound and unique sacredness of human beings as such.  The arbitrariness of our circumstance frees me to say that the Arbiter of our being might well act toward us freely, break in on us, present us with radical Truth in forms and figures we can radically comprehend.

As ever, Robinson's careful prose contains its own wonders; only now, typing that passage out, do I notice the exquisite application of the word "radically" to the verb "comprehend."  Of course, that is part of Robinson's argument: comprehension itself is radical, and implies radical things.  I will risk sounding like a fanboy, but I believe there's nothing short of remarkable in Robinson's gift for uniting beautiful ideas with beautiful words.  In that way reading The Givenness of Things is not so different from reading Robinson's fiction.  And as much as I have loved and treasured Housekeeping, Gilead, and Lila, I think perhaps this book has meant the most to me.

Lila by Marilynne Robinson

She thought, An unborn child lives the life of a woman it might never know, hearing her laugh or cry, feeling the scare that makes her catch her breath, tighten her belly.  For months its whole life would be all dreams and no waking.  The steps in the road, the thought of the knife, then the dread sinks away for a while, and how is a child to know why?  She could only guess what it was that Doll was afraid of, or ashamed of, but she lived her fear and her shame with her, taking off through the woods with an apple thumping in her lunch bucket and Doll wearing a big straw hat she must have hoped would shade her face enough to hide it a little.  More than once Doll took her hand to hurry her along and wouldn't let her catch her breath and never told her why.  She always stayed back from the firelight even when the night was cold and even when there were no strangers there to see.  Doane and the others saw, of course, but Lila was the only one she ever really trusted to look into her face.  Well, child, Lila thought, I will see you weltering in your blood.  And mine.  Lonely, frightened, my own child.  If the wildness doesn't carry us both away.  And if it does.

Marilynne Robinson's Gilead and Home tell two sides--let's say faces, like a polygon--of a story about a pair of families in rural Iowa in the mid-20th century.  Gilead, a lyrical novel written as a series of letters from the aging Reverend John Ames to the child he knows he will leave behind, is a beautiful but muted reflection on death and the bittersweetness of leaving a life behind you.  Home, about the prodigal son Jack Boughton (son of Ames' best friend), is about trying to create or recover a home that has long been broken, but compared to Gilead, it felt to me relatively stale and saccharine.

Lila tells the story of Ames' wife, a formerly vagrant drifter who finds herself thrust together with the much older Ames, and who asks him to marry her on an impulse.  Soon, she is carrying the child who will become the son who is the recipient of the letters of Gilead.  It's not in the first perspective, but the strength of voice that was missing in Home returns here, modulating Robinson's perfect liturgical prose with Lila's earthier language and mannerisms.  Lila also reaches back to Robinson's first novel, Housekeeping, for a sense of wildness and danger that the two other novels, meditative and sedate, largely forego.

The narrative begins when Lila is a child, viciously neglected by her family.  She's stolen away by a boarder named Doll, and they live for years together with a small band of migrant workers who drift throughout the Midwest.  She learns to trust no one except for Doll; she learns how to use a knife for fishing, cleaning, self-defense.  Eventually, Doll is arrested for using her knife--how exactly, and to what extent is never clear, but it seems to be on some member of Lila's family who's come looking for her--and the two part ways forever.  This parting lingers in Lila's spirit; without Doll she seems both lost to the world and vice versa.

In Ames' home, the two pass the time talking about the Bible.  Lila is attracted to a passage from Ezekiel, when God talks about his rescuing the nation of Israel: "And when I passed by thee, and saw thee weltering in thy blood, I said unto thee, Though thou art in the blood, live; yea, I said unto thee, Though thou art in thy blood, live."  She sees God's pity for Israel in Doll's pity for herself, a pity which she struggles to comprehend and honor.  She is smart, though uneducated, and challenges the staid Calvinist Ames in his views.  She chafes against thinking of Doll as unbaptized and lost:

Doll probably didn't know she had an immortal soul.  It was nothing she ever mentioned, if she ever thought about it.  She probably wouldn't even have known the words for it.  All those people out there walking the roads all those ears, hardly a one of them remembering the Sabbath.  Who would work when there was work to be done?  What use was there in calling a day by a certain name, or thinking of it as anything but the weather?  They knew what time of the year it was the timothy bloomed, when the birds were fledging.  They knew it was morning when the sun came up.  What more was there to know?  If Doll was going to be lost forever, Lila wanted to be right there with her, holding to the skirt of her dress.

Ames, and Robinson, come pretty close to answering this question with the idea of universal salvation.  Ames says,

If the Lord is more gracious than any of us can begin to imagine, and I'm sure He is, then your Doll and a whole lot of people are safe, and warm, and very happy.  And probably a little bit surprised.  If there is no Lord, then things are just the way they look to us.  Which is really much harder to accept.  I mean, it doesn't feel right.  There has to be more to it all, I believe.

Lila isn't a theological tract (and not half as close to one as Gilead), but rather an exploration of human uncertainty, and the valuable wisdom of instinct.  Lila's intelligence challenges Ames, and you get the sense that it challenges Robinson, as well, who carves a space for comfort for her characters without simple answers.  Though Lila seems to constantly have one foot out the door, called back by her life of wildness, she ultimately comes to recognize domestic tranquility as a kind of divine grace, a manifestation of the kind of pity that looks on a child weltering in its own blood and cares for it.  And then, with the birth of her son (who, as we know, will eventually be orphaned) she becomes a participant in that grace as well.

Lila is a staggeringly beautiful book.  I was disappointed that Home was such a bore, since Gilead strikes me as one of the best--maybe the best--novel of the 21st century.  But perhaps it was merely a sign that she's a human being.  Lila is almost as good, which is saying quite a lot.

Home by Marilynne Robinson

What does it mean to come home?  Glory had always thought home would be a house less cluttered and ungainly than this one, in a town larger than Gilead, or a city, where someone would be her intimate friend and the father of her children, of whom she would have no more than three.  Then she could learn what her own tastes were, within the limits of their means, of course.  She would not take one stick of furniture from her father's house, since none of it would be comprehensible in those spare, sunlit rooms.  The walnut furbelows and carved draperies and pilasters, the inlaid urns and flowers.  Who had thought of putting actual feet on chairs and sideboards, actual paws and talons?

She had dreamed of a real home for herself and the babies, and the fiance, a home very different from this good and blessed and fustian and oppressive tabernacle of Boughton probity and kind intent.  She knew, she had known for years, that she would never open a door on that home, never cross that threshold, never scoop up a pretty child and set it on her hip and feel it lean into her breast and eye the world from her arms with the complacency of utter trust.  Ah well.

Until my recent road trip, I had never been to those corn-strewn centers of the American Heartland: Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa.  I decided that I would only take with me books that took place in those states that were new to me, to immerse myself in them twice over.  I brought Willa Cather's O Pioneers, which I did not read, and two books that take place in Iowa: Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres and Marilynne Robinson's Home.  I was reading the latter when we drove through the southwest corner of Iowa on our way to Omaha from Kansas City.  We were there for only about five minutes before entering Nebraska.  Ah well.

Home tells the same story as Robinson's amazing novel, Gilead: Jack, the alcoholic black sheep of the Boughton family, comes home at last, carrying the burden of his estrangement from his wife in St. Louis, who is black.  But instead of telling the story through a first-person narrative, as with the Boughton's friend and neighbor Reverend Ames in Gilead, Home uses the third person, focused on Jack's sister Glory, who has herself recently "come home."  But Ames' voice and reflection were the strength of Gilead, and their absence drains the story of what was most appealing.  Glory, while sensitively and carefully rendered as a character, cannot make up the lack.

I'm not sure what the point of this novel is.   Gilead is the Abraham story, I suppose--the old man blessed with a child late in life, concerned with what kind of inheritance and legacy he will leave.  Home offers the prodigal son story that is ancillary in Gilead, the main focus instead of a B-plot.  And yet, outside of the (pretty vanilla) relationship between Jack and Glory, Home fails to offer any fresh viewpoint on what's already been told.  The most interesting gap in Gilead--the relationship between Jack and his wife in the racially charged St. Louis of the 1950's (sad to say that it seems not much has changed on that front)--remains a gap.

Robinson's writing is characteristically stellar, but the humble Heartland nature of the story bleeds into the prose, which is lacking in the kind of show-stopping pyrotechnics of Housekeeping and, to a lesser extent, Gilead.  Ultimately, however, it's a frustrating read, unsatisfying and unnecessary.  The good news is that Robinson's newest novel, which is about Reverend Ames' wife Lila, comes out in October.  Her character is so mysterious and lightly sketched in these novels that a whole book about her should be illuminating in the way that Home wants and fails to be.

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

For me writing has always felt like praying, even when I wasn't writing prayers, as I was often enough.  You feel that you are with someone.  I feel I am with you now, whatever that can mean, considering that you're only a little fellow now and when you're a man you might find these letters of no interest.  Or they might never reach you, for any of a number of reasons.  Well, but how deeply I regret any sadness you suffered and how grateful I am in anticipation of any good you have enjoyed.  That is to say, I pray for you.  And there's an intimacy in it.  That's the truth.

I actually read Gilead a few months ago, but then my roommate stole it before I could post on it.  In his defense, it's a good book to steal; as lyrically accomplished as Robinson's Housekeeping and even more emotionally affecting--affecting, in fact, in a way that few books written in the last half century seem to me.

The narrator of Gilead is John Ames, a minister in Iowa who is, he knows, in the final stages of his life, writing a last series of letters to his young son, the product of a marriage to a much younger woman.  These letters become an exploration of ideas that Ames knows he won't live to share with his son, an exploration of the nature of God as well as of his own history, his relationship with his wife, and his relationship with his father and grandfather, tracing his family history all the way back to the Civil War.  Like in Housekeeping, Robinson's prose is really something to marvel at, but writing from Ames' perspective forces Robinson to curtail some of her more baroque tendencies.  Yet somehow, that limitation strengthens the writing by giving it a colloquial groundedness:

I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again.  I know that this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that.  There is a human beauty in it.  And I can't believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us.  In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets.  Because I don't imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.

There is something beautiful and audacious about calling life "the great bright dream of procreating and perishing," yet those words seem as if they come from Ames, and not from Robinson speaking through him, and that's a really difficult tightrope to cross.

Ames' project becomes troubled when Jack Boughton, the black-sheep son of his closest friend, returns home after a long absence.  Robinson cannily keeps the sins which Boughton is guilty of under wraps for most of the novel, instead focusing on the anxiety that overcomes Ames when he sees how close Boughton is becoming with his wife and son.  But Ames needs Boughton; his return allows him to confront his own believes about forgiveness, family, and love:

There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or a parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality.  It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal.  So how could it subordinate itself to cause or consequence?

I wish that my thoughts on this book were a little bit fresher, because looking through the pages I've dog-eared, I see any number of really striking, heartfelt passages like the one above that I'd like to talk about in relation to the novel as a whole.  But what I recall about it the most is that it resounds with a real sense of humanity--one that Housekeeping, though fantastic, often lacked.

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

Cain murdered Abel, and blood cried out from the earth; the house fell on Job's children, and a voice was induced or provoked into speaking from a whirlwind; and Rachel mourned for her children; and David for Absalom. The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted. That is why the first event is known to have been an expulsion, and the last is hoped to be a reconciliation and return. So memory pulls us forward, so prophecy is only brilliant memory--there will be a garden where all of us as one child will sleep in our mother Eve, hooped in her ribs and staved by her spine.

Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping is revelatory--both in the sense that it was, for me, a revelation to discover a novel of such clear, confident prose, and in the sense that it communicates an apocalyptic vision of the world, one which promises a final unification of all things.

Ruth, the novel's heroine, lives in a life of constant abandonment in the remote far West town of Fingerbone. Her grandfather (in a train) and her mother (in an automobile) plunged into the same lake. Her guardian great-aunts, Lily and Nona, foist Ruth and her sister Lucille off on their aunt Sylvie, who returns from a drifter's life to take care of them.

Sylvie is peculiar. Like a transient, she sleeps on the top of her sheets, in her shoes. She seems not to care that Ruth and Lucille do not attend school. She keeps the light off in the parlor to hide the mounting collections of tin cans and old newspapers. Lucille, understandably, does not like her. But Sylvie acts the prophet for Ruth, communicating through her actions the possibility that time will bring all things back together:

Who would think of dusting or sweeping the cobwebs down in a room used for the storage of cans and newspapers--things utterly without value? Sylvie only kept them, I think, because she considered accumulation to be the essence of housekeeping, and because she considered the hoarding of worthless things to be proof of a particularly scrupulous thrift.

It seems to me that Housekeeping is the kind of book that could only be written in America, where we struggle with the consequences of fierce individualism and expansionism, and even then only in the West, which is the frontier also of that struggle. Isolated and "chastened... by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere," the town of Fingerbone longs to be knit back into that whole. Not only with the rest of the world, but with the lake it surrounds, which Ruth frequently imagines as a parallel world where the dead live, inaccessible. Even the name "Fingerbone" suggests the limitations of flesh and bone, which prevent us from joining the spiritual realm.

Sylvie's haphazard care threatens to have Ruth taken away, because like all prophets, she is misunderstood:

Imagine that Noah knocked his house apart and used the planks to build an ark, while his neighbors looked on, full of doubt. A house, he must have told them, should be daubed with pitch and built to float cloud high, if need be. A lettuce patch was of no use at all, and a good foundation was worse than useless. A house should have a compass and a keel. The neighbors would have put their hands in their pockets and chewed their lips and strolled home to houses they now found wanting in ways they could not understand.

This really striking parable becomes truth twice--once literally, when the town floods, and once figuratively, when Sylvie finally impresses Ruth into a life of drifting. Houses and homes, perhaps, are doomed attempts to connect with one's environment. I also love the bold, sharply American way that Robinson rewrites these Biblical tales, which she does even with the Gospel:

And when He did die it was sad--such a young man, so full of promise, and His mother wept and His friends could not believe the loss, and the story spread everywhere and the mourning would not be comforted, until He was so sharply lacked and so powerfully remembered that his friends felt Him beside them as they walked along the road, and saw someone cooking fish on the shore and knew it to be Him, and sat down to supper with Him, all wounded as He was. There is so little to remember of anyone--an anecdote, a conversation at table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the hear in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not meant to keep us waiting so long.

I find that piece of prose incredibly difficult to respond to in writing. Beyond its simple beauty, it is incredibly, outrageously bold, and yet, its spirit seems to me to be in keeping with the Gospel. And its hope is boundless! As Robinson tells us, "That most moments were substantially the same did not detract at all from the possibility that the next moment might be utterly different." Life can be such a patched-up, threadbare affair, but fear not:

For why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of a hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are a sleep, and even when we are so old that our thoughts have abandoned other business? What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?