About Marilynne Robinson

 I came late to Marilynne Robinson as I have come late to every American writer publishing after 1970. What I think of her writing lies in your future. This review of her latest novel, Jack, hits on the important aspects of her writing I found important:

For Jack, it is a catastrophe; he believes himself a wrecker of lives, and yet “here he was, entrusted again … with another human soul”. He edges painfully towards respectability, and signals his willingness to remain in Della’s town by placing a potted geranium in his small bare room. He discovers that Della in her gentle way “was making everything easier. What would she find becoming in him? That was what he did.” Occasionally Della appears too virtuous by half, sanctified by love to an extent you’d think would put her beyond the touch of any human hand, still less that of a ne’er-do-well. But since the entirety of the novel is placed within the consciousness of Jack, we conceive of her as he does: the arrival of an unsought and unmerited grace. That she is a black woman further places a barrier between them, since even if Jack were to exchange the beer bottle for an ordered and virtuous life, racist laws would forbid the marriage. Here Robinson interrogates and inverts the structures of power: Della’s family has respectability and status, and when her father the bishop meets Jack he gives him “a look like a rifle shot”. This is not a new theme emerging, with Robinson hastening to respond to the Black Lives Matter movement, but rather the continuation of her examination of America’s racial trauma, which began in Gilead, with Ames reflecting on the life of his abolitionist grandfather.

Robinson’s style, which in her debut, Housekeeping, could fly off into ecstatic moments in a kind of surreal metaphysics, has been refined into a restrained and occasionally almost casual lexis, concerned with a penetrating engagement with psychological realism and the lasting import of apparently small acts. Of all her novels, this is the most frankly amusing: the deep moral seriousness of Robinson’s vision is frequently leavened with set pieces that almost approach farce, such as when Jack attempts to distinguish his own kitten from numerous identical street cats by dousing it with cheap aftershave.

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 So this is a Calvinist romance, and set against a contemporary fondness for novels that deal pessimistically with an individual psychology, unloosed from any philosophical or religious foundation beyond a little light politics or feminism, Robinson’s insistence on her radiant, uncynical vision, deeply rooted in St Paul and Augustine and Feuerbach, appears downright radical. She is concerned with what the theologians call “common grace”; the capacity shared by all human creatures for receiving the gifts of life with wonder and gratitude, quite irrespective of belief or unbelief in God. In her essay collection When I Was a Child I Read Books she writes, “one of the crucial things [Calvin] brings to me, is that the encounter with another being is an occasion in which you can, to the best of your ability, honour the other person as being someone sent to you by God”. Jack’s task is to discover whether his father’s doctrines may after all not crush the love that arrived, unasked and unwanted, in a graveyard, but in fact elevate it to evidence of the divine.

The Guardian also has more on Ms. Robinson here.