Marilynne Robinson

I had never heard of Marilynne Robinson until I saw a review of her recently published second novel, Gilead , a few months ago in The Atlantic . That review inspired me to get a copy of her first novel, Housekeeping , which is one of the most bizarre, funny, affecting novels I have read in a long time. (I’m sure that part of its affect arises from her evocation of the stark landscape of the NW. The book is set in Fingerbone, Idaho, and Robinson herself grew up in Sandpoint.) Her collection of essays, The Death of Adam , also looks to be a corker. She spends a number of pages in the introduction defending John Calvin against detractors like Acton, Bainton, and Weber. To give the flavor of her style:

Ruth, the narrator of Housekeeping , is reflecting on a story told by her aunt Sylvie about a pitiful woman whom Sylvie met in a bus station: “Such a separation, I imagined, could indeed lead to loneliness intense enough to make one conspicuous in bus stations. It occurred to me that most people in bus stations would be conspicuous if it were not for the numbers of others there who would otherwise be conspicuous in the same way.”

From the introduction to The Death of Adam : “suddenly we act as if the reality of economics were reality itself, the one Truth to which everything must refer. I can only suggest that terror at complexity has drive us back on this very crude monism. We have reached a point where cosmology permits us to say that everything might in fact be made of nothing, so we cling desperately to the idea that something is real and necessary, and we have chosen, oddly enough, competition and market forces, taking refuge from the wild epic of cosmic ontogeny by hiding our head in a ledger.”

Also from the Introduction, commenting on Weber’s Protestant Ethic : “By comparison with Lutherans, Calvinists lack gemutlichkeit – they are not good fellows. Weber says you can see this in their faces. This is the new historical method. This is how spirit becomes a term suitable for use in economic analysis . . . ..I know Weber’s book has been long and widely thought to merit respect. Try as I may, I can find no grounds for this view. (He, like Acton, is said to have been spectacularly learned. He wrote analyses of the ethics and social forms of Confucianism, Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and ancient Judaism. But then, if he used the gemutlichkeit method, he may have found that fairly light work.)”

And this profound idea on the origins of culture in the notion that men have souls: “It was not leisure that was the basis of culture, as many have argued, but the profoundly democratic idea that anyone was only incidentally the servant of his or her interests in this world; that, truly and ideally, a biography was the passage of a soul through the vale of its making, or its destruction, and that the business of the world was a parable or test or temptation or distraction and therefore engrossing, and full of the highest order of meaning, but in itself a fairly negligible thing.”