The First Church of Marilynne Robinson

Martin Amis, in his New Yorker review of Don DeLillo’s “The Angel Esmeralda,” argued that any time we claim to love a writer’s work, we are always stretching the truth. “What we really mean,” he wrote, “is that we love about half of it.” He puts forward his own favorite writer, William Shakespeare, as a strong test case: “Run your eye down the contents page, and feel the slackness of your urge to reread the comedies (‘As You Like It’ is not as we like it); and who would voluntarily curl up with ‘King John’ or ‘Henry VI, Part III’?” Amis has obviously got a point here, but when I read the review I thought of a prominent exception to the rule he’d just formulated. Marilynne Robinson has published only three novels in a career spanning more than thirty years, but each of those novels is a masterpiece. When I say that I love Marilynne Robinson’s work, I’m not talking about half of it; I’m talking about every word of it.

There are two major reasons why, although these reasons are so difficult to separate from one another that they might just as well be one. The first is the grace of Robinson’s prose. In “Housekeeping,” her first novel, the narrator Ruthie says of her grandmother that “the wind that billowed her sheets announced to her the resurrection of the ordinary,” and this kind of resurrection is as central to Robinson’s aesthetic sensibility as the Christian resurrection is to her spiritual one. Her work is filled with countless indelible descriptions of water, and these descriptions are always animated by an elemental sense of wonder about this most familiar and necessary of substances. Here Ruthie contemplates the lake outside her hometown of Fingerbone in which, over the years, both her grandfather and her mother have drowned:

The lake at our feet was plain, clear water, bottomed with smooth stones or simple mud. It was quick with small life, like any pond, as modest in its transformations of the ordinary as any puddle. Only the calm persistence with which the water touched, and touched, and touched, sifting all the little stones, jet, and white, and hazel, forced us to remember that the lake was vast, and in league with the moon (for no sublunar account could be made of its shimmering, cold life).

For Robinson, water is more than just a metaphor for God. It is itself a divine presence, a form of immanence that creates and sustains life, and sometimes destroys it, and remains mysterious no matter how familiar it might seem to us. One of my favorite passages in all of her work is Reverend Ames’s description, in “Gilead,” of stopping on his way to church one morning to watch a young couple walking ahead of him in the street:

The sun had come up brilliantly after a heavy rain, and the trees were glistening and very wet. On some impulse, plain exuberance, I suppose, the fellow jumped up and caught hold of a branch, and a storm of luminous water came pouring down on the two of them, and they laughed and took off running, the girl sweeping water off her hair and her dress as if she were a little bit disgusted, but she wasn’t. It was a beautiful thing to see, like something from a myth. I don’t know why I thought of that now, except perhaps because it is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash. I wish I had paid more attention to it. My list of regrets may seem unusual, but who can know that they are, really. This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.

The simple, unself-conscious beauty of these sentences are inseparable from, and equal to, the beauty they describe. The passage feels like an instinctual insight into a way of experiencing the world that is otherwise alien to me. I have read and loved a lot of literature about religion and religious experience—Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Flannery O’Connor, the Bible—but it’s only with Robinson that I have actually felt what it must be like to live with a sense of the divine.

The second reason why I love Robinson, then, is how her writing puts me inside an apprehension of the world that is totally foreign to me, and that I have often approached with borderline hostility. (I’m Irish, so when I think about religion I tend to think about suffering and self-hatred. Or boredom and terror. Or the controlled intellectual and sexual famines the Catholic Church imposed on every generation of Irish people before my own. Or much worse things.) But even though I’m a more or less a fully paid-up atheist, I’m more drawn to Robinson’s Christian humanism than I am to the Dawkins-Dennett-Hitchens-Harris school of anti-theist fighting talk.

Perhaps that’s because Robinson’s moral wisdom seems inseparable from her gifts as a prose writer. Near the end of “Gilead,” Ames contemplates Jack Boughton, the wayward son of his friend Reverend Robert Boughton. He finds himself unable to understand Jack’s motivations, the reasons for the miserable and self-destructive life he has lead. “In every important way,” he writes, “we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence.” Coming from a Calvinist minister, this sounds at first surprisingly like moral relativism, but what it is, really, is moral intelligence. He continues: “We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.”

This is not the kind of voice I normally associate with religious people, and it makes me wonder whether we might not be listening to the wrong voices. (A resolution: instead of clicking links to stories about the Westboro Baptist Church condemning, say, the Foo Fighters to the eternal flames of perdition, I’ll read a paragraph or two of an essay by Robinson instead.) In her new non-fiction collection, “When I Was a Child I Read Books,” there’s an essay called “Imagination and Community” in which Robinson discusses her conviction that the capacity to make imaginative connections with other people, familiar and foreign, is the basis of community:

I would say, for the moment, that community, at least community larger than the immediate family, consists very largely of imaginative love for people we do not know or whom we know very slightly. This thesis may be influenced by the fact that I have spent literal years of my life lovingly absorbed in the thoughts and perceptions of—who knows it better than I?—people who do not exist. And, just as writers are engrossed in the making of them, readers are profoundly moved and also influenced by the nonexistent, that great clan whose numbers increase prodigiously with every publishing season. I think fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification.

This is a common enough belief, and it’s one that is frequently expressed by writers of fiction. It’s not an argument I am normally much swayed by, but Robinson’s fiction is an eloquent form of proof. She makes an atheist reader like myself capable of identifying with the sense of a fallen world that is filled with pain and sadness but also suffused with divine grace. Robinson is a Calvinist, but her spiritual sensibility is richly inclusive and non-dogmatic. There’s little talk about sin or damnation in her writing, but a lot about forgiveness and tolerance and kindness. Hers is the sort of Christianity, I suppose, that Christ could probably get behind. I’ll never share her way of seeing and thinking about the world and our place in it, but her writing has shown me the value and beauty of these perspectives.

I’ve always been haunted by a remark Samuel Beckett made in a letter to the Irish novelist Aidan Higgins, in which he referred to “writing style, that vanity” as “a bow tie about a throat cancer.” It’s a great line, and a stylish one (Beckett was, among other things, one of the great dicky-bowed prose stylists of the twentieth century), but its suggestion that there is something fraudulent about literary eloquence is a corrosive one. It makes such writing seem slightly contemptible, a kind of sad and futile indulgence. To me, Robinson is a powerful refutation of this idea. There is nothing fraudulent about her eloquence, nothing remotely shifty or meretricious about the beauty of her sentences. Her voice is at once sad and ecstatic, conversationally fluent and formally precise. And it doesn’t feel like a performance or a feint. It doesn’t feel like Beckett’s version of vanity. It feels like wisdom. Perhaps not the kind of wisdom I am used to acknowledging, but wisdom all the same.