All this is to say that Marilynne Robinson stands virtually alone. Staring with Housekeeping—an uncanny little novel, published in 1981, that quietly established itself as a cult classic—Robinson has devoted her entire career to the investigation of the spiritual life. Or I should say “spiritual living,” because her books wrestle with the question of what it means to confront the world as a religious person, a person who is committed to the tenets of Christianity—which Robinson summed up, in an essay published a few years ago in The American Scholar, as “grace, generosity, and liberality”—while at the same time participating as fully as possible in daily human existence. “What I might call personal holiness,” she remarks, “is in fact openness to the perception of the holy, in existence itself and above all in one another.”

In Housekeeping, perhaps because Robinson did not dare directly to broach such an unfashionable subject in her first novel, such perceptions are largely kept beneath the surface, emerging in the symbols and the subtexts of this extraordinarily rich work about two abandoned children under the care of a loving but deeply unconventional aunt. Twenty-three years went by before her second novel appeared. Then came Gilead, the life story of a Congregationalist preacher named John Ames, told in a diary-style letter composed over a period of weeks and intended for his young son to read as an adult. At the start of the book, Ames, who became a father late in life—he is seventy-six years old—has been recently diagnosed with angina pectoris, and reports that “a flutter of my pulse makes me think of final things.” As Ames reminisces about his father and grandfather and contemplates the path his life took, the novel’s true story gradually emerges from his meandering thoughts: the transgressions of Jack Boughton, the son of his closet friend, and Ames’s inability to forgive them.

In a profile in The New York Times Magazine, Robinson remarked that she had been trying to write a different novel, “a darkly comedic story of a woman ‘abraded’ by her experience of the world.” One day she tried writing a poem in the voice of the elderly preacher who was a minor character in the book, and out of this Gilead rapidly emerged. Now, four years later—the blink of an eye, in Robinsonian time—we have Home, which must be some form of that previous novel.

Much has been made of Robinson’s religiosity, the biblical cadence of her prose, and her attempts to “perceive the holy.” Although many online commentators discussed her review, in 2006, of Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion, fewer have noted “Credo,” an essay she published in the spring 2008 issue of the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, which I take to be the most recent explicit iteration of her view of Christian religion. (A subscription to the publication is available for free; I called the magazine’s office when I heard Robinson’s essay was to be published there, and received not only the spring issue but also the autumn issue.) Robinson’s essay is long and consistently rewarding, but I’ll excerpt only one notable passage:

I have read that certain physicists, grappling with what is apparently the anomalous weakness of the force of gravity, have posited the existence of another universe, whose influence is felt by ours. Earth’s gravity, they say, could be a consequence, a sort of shadow effect, of that other reality. Such a notion might never be accessible to any sort of test, but I think it serves very well as metaphor. Anomalies in our thinking might simply mean that we have no conception of what is in play, what other university of intentions, presence, passion, and grace liberates our limbs, lightens our burdens, softens our fall, permits a weightiness that is not entrapment. The physicists remind us every day that anomaly is very much to be respected, and that knowledge proceeds by conceding the existence of reality beyond our knowledge—“dark energy” being one striking recent example. I feel that reverence requires a somewhat greater humility relative to the nature and the will of God. So I explore along the lines of imagination, memory, intuition, learning what I can by the means that are given to me.

As I have said, I am not of the school of thought that finds adherence to doctrine synonymous with firmness of faith. On the contrary, I believe that faith in God is a liberation of thought, because thought is an ongoing instruction in things that pertain to God. To test this belief is my fictional practice, the basis for the style and substance of my two novels and the motive behind my nonfiction. This might seem to some people to be paradoxical, a religious believe in intellectual openness. This would seem like a contradiction in the minds of religion’s detractors and also, apparently, in the minds of a significant number of its adherents. I think of Wallace Stevens’s “the mind in the act of finding what will suffice.” I think of Theodore Roethke’s “I learn by going where I have to go.” Calvin called the universe a school in which we are to be instructed. This feels deeply right to me. And I think of Paul’s saying, “It is for freedom that Christ made us free.”

It is obvious that Robinson comes by her language not only from a deep understanding of Christian literature, but also from the faith that underpins her interest in it. In recent years I have found myself increasingly attracted to what might be called the literary qualities of religious discourse, in particular Christian writing. (This may account for some part of my interest in early American history.) Yet I was not raised in a particularly religious household, and my fascination has not yet been accompanied by spiritual yearning. I have wondered at some length whether the language that appeals to me could be available to me as a writer. Late last year, reading the poet Christian Wiman’s book Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet, I came across this passage in his “Notes on Poetry and Religion”:

I think it is a grave mistake for a writer to rely on the language of a religion in which he himself does not believe. You can sense the staleness and futility of an art that seeks energy in gestures and language that are, in the artist’s life, inert. It feels like a failure of imagination, a shortcut to a transcendence that he either doesn’t really buy, or has not earned in his work. Of course, exactly what constitutes “belief” for a person is a difficult question. One man’s anguished atheism may get him closer to God than another man’s mild piety. There is more genuine religious feeling in Philip Larkin’s godless despair and terror than there is anywhere in late Wordsworth.

With this in mind, I asked Robinson after a reading last April whether she felt that unbelievers can make full use of religious language. Somewhat to my surprise, she disagreed with Wiman’s initial assertion quoted above. I hope someday to read further thoughts from her on this topic, whether in an interview or in her own writing.

In the meantime, some additional reading related to Home: The Paris Review has interviewed Robinson for its “Art of Fiction” series, and made the transcript available online; Bryan Appleyard recently profiled Robinson for The Times of London, calling her “the world’s best writer of prose”; the critic James Wood reviewed Home in The New Yorker; the critic A.O. Scott reviewed the novel for the New York Times Book Review; and the New York Times has also made available online the book’s first chapter.

Last Thursday, I had the pleasure of attending a lecture by Robinson at DePaul University in Chicago. She read two essays, one of which will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Harvard Divinity Bulletin. I typed up a portion of my notes and e-mailed them to Patrick Kurp, of the blog Anecdotal Evidence, and he excerpted them online in this post:

Underpinning the first paper she delivered was her assertion that nothing is as complex as the human mind, and that various deterministic theories (Freud, economic rationalism, selfish-gene theory, etc.) do harm to this fact. She doesn’t understand “why human beings are so persistent in their attack on what is most distinctive about them.”
She then asserted that “if you do not believe in thought you cannot believe in faith” and, in a swipe at Christopher Hitchens and his ilk, that “those who attack faith devalue thought.” Later on in the essay, she praised Calvin’s assertion that “an encounter with the other is always an encounter with God,” said that she tries to live by that understanding, and stressed that reverence is the proper way of relating to the “shining garment of reality” in which God reveals himself constantly.

Lastly, an excerpt of Robinson’s 2007 commencement-day speech at Amherst has been published in the current issue of Harper’s. The full text of the speech, titled “Waiting to Be Remembered,” is available online at Amherst magazine.

Neither book’s narrative recommends itself to me, yet the deliberative tone Robinson strikes perfectly counters her more lyrical passages, and I found myself connecting emotionally to the main characters of each. To use a phrase borrowed from Ann Patchett, a former student at Iowa who reviewed the newer novel for the New York Observer, Robinson’s characters “luxuriate in time,” living the reflective lives we wish we could enjoy. Thankfully, an added benefit of Gilead, little remarked upon by the book’s many reviewers, is that its form—a letter written by the dying, seventy-six-year-old Reverend John Ames to his young son—invites repeated readings; once you’ve finished the book and know the relationships between its eight or ten main characters, the one-to-three-page, diarylike entries are perfect for savoring individually.

After completing Gilead, I sought further commentary from Robinson, and found a lot on the internet. Beyond her brief faculty profile at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, there are a number of interviews, including one at The Atlantic, one at the LA Weekly, and one at Powells.com. There are also audio interviews from two NPR programs (one, two).