Marilynne Robinson is an American original. There is little trace of the secondhand in her fiction or nonfiction. One might see in Gilead, Home, Lila and Jack -- her novels about the families of two Iowa Presbyterian ministers who are close friends --  a certain cloistered sensibility in common with Georges Bernanos’s Diary of A Country Priest, but no definite association. James Wood, though, casts a wider net, “There is a familiar American simplicity, which is Puritan and colloquial in origin, ‘a sort of ecstatic fire that takes things down to the essential’, as Robinson has it in Gilead. We recognize it in the Puritan sermon, in Jonathan Edwards, in Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs, in Mark Twain, in Willa Cather, in Hemingway.” After reading two of her collections of essays, Absence of Mind and When I Was A Child I Read Books, I believe that Emerson and William James in Varieties of Religious Experience can be counted if not influences then inspirations.

I suspect Robinson might find the Catholic apologist G.K. Chesterton an agreeable dinner companion. (I’m also guessing she might sympathize with Chesterton’s notion of a respect for tradition as “the democracy of the dead.”) And I would love to hear a symposium with Robinson and Garry Wills. One thing she certainly shares with both is an absolute lack of any interest in the fashionable. 

Robinson has been described as having a cult following, but I think that is, no matter how you define cult, misleading. Let’s just say that despite an interest in themes and subjects shared by almost no other American writer, she has won a substantial readership -- one that, despite a Pulitzer nomination for Housekeeping, a Pulitzer for Gilead, an Orange Prize (the prestigious U.K. award for women writers) for Home, and a lovely film version of Housekeeping by Scottish director Bill Forsythe in 1987, has never threatened to spill over into the realm of “popular.”  This perhaps began to change in 2015 when her best known admirer, Barack Obama, interviewed her for the New York Review of Books, and will almost certainly surge thanks to the Oprah Book Club, which just announced the four Gilead novels as its next selections.

Rhetoric is heard, John Stuart Mill said, and poetry is overheard. Robinson, I expect, wants to be overheard. I would say Marilynne Robinson has been overheard by more readers than any other living American writer. 

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The acclaim garnered by what Oprah calls “the Gilead universe” has sent readers back to her first book, Housekeeping (1980), the closest Robinson has come to writing a secular novel.  Four decades later, the book has lost none of its power, remaining enigmatic and elusive. Housekeeping is set in the early 1950s in the town of Fingerbone, Idaho, “never an impressive town. It was chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere” – except for a spectacular accident a generation before the story takes place in which a train and its passengers slid off a long trestle bridge outside Fingerbone and disappeared forever into a deep mountain lake. 

The tragedy haunts the town and the characters in the story. The grandfather of two young sisters, Ruthie and Lucille, was on the train and their mother, for reasons the girls can’t fathom, later commits suicide by plunging her car into the same lake. To Ruthie, the older of the sisters and the narrator, her mother is a constant presence, though “She was a music I no longer heard, that rang in my mind.” 

There are practically no men in Ruthie’s world. Her grandfather died before she was born, and her father, who abandoned the family when Ruthie was an infant, isn’t even  a memory. In a reverie that sounds more like an intrusion of the author than a mediation of Ruthie’s, Robinson writes of the grandmother,  “She could feel that sharp loneliness she had felt every long evening since she was a child. It was the kind of loneliness that made clocks seem slow and loud and made voices sound like voices across water. Old women she had known, first her grandmother then her mother, rocked on their porches in the evenings and sang sad songs, and did not wish to be spoken to.”

After their grandmother’s death, two great aunts come to take over the household but soon long to escape. Their aunt Sylvie returns to the gothic house she grew up in to look after the girls, who are now teenagers. At first Ruthie and Lucille, who see in Sylvie a sort of return of their mother, are ecstatic.   She sings nostalgic songs like “Irene” and “What’ll I Do When You Are Far Away?” and imposes no strictures on them. The girls choose to skip school and take long hikes in the woods. Sylvie, whose own past is mysterious (sits on the porch, falls asleep on park benches and carries packets of oyster crackers in her coat pockets to feed to the town dogs, who follow her as if she was the pied piper.  

Lucille is irritated and then alarmed by Sylvie’s growing eccentricity. (She washes tin cans and stacks them in the kitchen and collects newspapers for no apparent reason, stacking them in the living and dining rooms.)  Lucille, desperate to escape her family’s shattered history and join the respectable class, finally leaves the house and takes shelter with one of her teachers. 

Ruthie, though, is gradually drawn towards Sylvie’s rootless life. “Memory,” she comes to feel, “is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it.” When local authorities threaten to take custody of the girls, Ruthie and Sylvie leave town for a life of drifting. Someday, she muses about her sister, “When I am feeling presentable, I will go into Fingerbone and make inquiries. I must do it soon for such days are rare now.” 

I’m hard put to explain why Housekeeping has touched so many people so deeply, and after rereading it, I struggle to put words to what I love about it. Let me try this: I’m touched by the yearning that every character has for something beyond their everyday lives. I’m touched, too, by the way that nothing in Robinson’s world is inconsequential. 

Here’s a passage I marked with I first read Housekeeping in 1982 that I recall with surprising clarity. The sisters, who skip school a lot, enjoy taking long walks at dawn: On one walk, they are joined on the road “By a fat old bitch with a naked black belly and circles of white around her eyes. She was called Crip, because as a puppy she had favored one leg and now that she was an elderly dog she favored three. She tottered after us briskly, a companionable gleam in her better eye. I describe her at length because a mile or so from town she disappeared into the woods as if following a scent and never appeared again. She was a dog of no special consequence, and she passed from the world unlamented. Yet something of the somberness with which Lucille and I remembered this outing had to do with our last glimpse of her fat haunches and her palsied, upright tail as she clamored up the rocks and into the dusky dark of the woods. 

Crip passed from the world unlamented except by Marilynne Robinson. 

I urge readers who have discovered Robinson through the Gilead novels to seek out Housekeeping, which she tells, “is meant as sort of demonstration of the intellectual culture of my childhood. It was my intention to make only those allusions that would have been available to my narrator, Ruth, if she were me, at her age more or less.”

These allusions, she writes, were drawn from Latin textbooks she studied in high school in Idaho and a thought planted in her mind by her brother David, who told her, “God is a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. I never thought to ask him where he found it.”  

A faint but tantalizing whiff of nihilism wafts through Housekeeping.   Gilead, Home, Lila, and the recent Jack are about members of the families of two Presbyterian ministers, John Ames and Robert Boughton, who are close friends. There is no way to make this background sound timely, relevant or sexy to fans of Jonathan Franzen or Zadie Smith, but, James Wood again in a review of Gilead,  the novel ”achieves an almost holy simplicity.” Surely this applies to three other three novels.

Housekeeping is a novel about girls and women. Gilead features Robinson’s first male characters, the Reverend Boughton and his prodigal son Jack, who has lived aimlessly, homeless and unmarried  (one wonders if  somewhere on the road his path crossed Sylvie and Ruthie’s). Jack has spent time in jail and fathered a child with a black woman, the latter of which does not appall his family so much as puzzle them. The happiness stirred by his return home (where a younger sister cares for their father) is mitigated by the unspoken knowledge that he will not stay and ultimately cannot find peace in his father’s religion.  The other Gilead novels are essentially an expansion on this theme

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Robinson did not write another novel for 24 years. Her nonfiction might be seen as an attempt to expand on her early themes. Her next book was the extraordinary and little read Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution (1989). I know few admirers of Robinsons’ work who have even heard of it.   I had never heard of it myself until I saw a copy at the Strand in New York City.  I wasn’t even sure it was written by the same Marilynne Robinson.  (A book on nuclear pollution from the author of Housekeeping?) 

I didn’t think anyone was capable of sustaining my interest in this subject, but she had me after the first sentence: “The largest producer of plutonium in the world and the largest source, by far, of radioactive contamination of the world’s environment is Great Britain.”  Plutonium dumped into the sea from the notorious government-owned Sellafield Plant “has already been found in Ireland, Iceland, Sweden, Denmark and Belgium.”  It is “perhaps not irrelevant to note … that Britain leads the world in lung cancer deaths.”  

This is scary stuff, written by a writer who is not given to hyperbole.  “My attack,” she says, “will seem ill-tempered and eccentric, a veering toward anarchy, the unsettling emergence of lady novelist as petroleuse.” (I’m sorry to interrupt this eloquent diatribe, but I have to point out the use of the magnificent word petroleuse which, after 30 minutes of frantic research, I discovered is the name for the women of the Paris Commune of 1871 who were accused of burning down a big chunk of Paris.)  “I am angry to the depths of my soul that the earth has been so injured while we were all bemused by supposed monuments of self and intellect, vaults of bogus cultural riches … The grief comes home to others while I and my kind have been occupied with lies on my conscience like a crime.” 

With a passion and clarity missing from most political journalists, she strips away myths about British and American histories of social responsibility. Her conviction that the US’s commitment to social justice is considerably greater – considerably greater – than the UK’s is eye-popping.  For instance, the relative state of government support for our citizens: “Why do the Land Grant Act, the Homestead Act, and the GI Bill, three distributions of wealth to the public on a scale never contemplated in Britain, have no status among political events when the dreary traffic in pittances institutionalized as the British Welfare State is hailed as the advance of socialism?”

Contrary to the fears of American conservatives that the US is veering towards a British-type socialism “Almost no one in the West spends as little on health care as the British, despite the fact that they lead the world in death rates from heart disease and lung cancer …”  

The bedrock British political assumption she finds “is that absolutely nothing belongs to the general public inalienably by the logic of collective interests or by right … public ownership of a bridge, a tunnel, or a river is for them a departure from the natural order of things.”  It’s hard for an American to read these words more than three decades later without a shudder as we recognize a similar attitude taking hold here. And with it comes an arrogance that rationalizes the right of the powerful to pollute what belongs to all of us: “It is a very comfortable thing,” she concludes, “to think that the greatest threat to the world is a decision still to be made, which may never be made – that is, the decision to engage in nuclear warfare. Sadly, the truth is quite otherwise. The earth has been under attack for almost half a century.”  And by now, for nearly three-quarters of a century.

Surely this remarkable work of polemical journalism needs to be updated and read.  

 * * *

The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought and Absence of Mind, The Dispelling of Inwardness From the Modern Myth of the Self  are not arguments for the existence of God or the validity of Christianity in the mode of, say, C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity or G.K. Chesterton’s Catholic apologia Orthodoxy.  Robinson seldom cites popular atheists such as Bertrand Russell and Christopher Hitchens, and then only in passing.  She doesn’t go in for turf wars; there are no battles with secular liberals or right wing evangelicals. 

There are two main themes to these books. The first is that the liberal conscience of Christianity traces back to the Old Testament or, as she puts it in The Death of Adam, “The law of Moses puts liberation theology to shame in its passionate loyalty to the poor.” She also believes, fervently, that the origins of modern Protestant liberality, the kind that possessed the mid-19th century abolitionists, are to be found in Calvinism. Both of these theses came as a great surprise to me and will have to wait till I can find a large chunk of reading time before I can give my assent. 

Her other and perhaps larger concern is that there is no essential divide between religion and science. “What I wish to question,” she writes in Absence of Mind, “are not the methods of science, but the methods of a kind of argument that claims the authority of science or highly specialized knowledge, that assumes a protective coloration that allows it to pass for science yet does not practice the self-discipline or self-criticism for which science  is distinguished.”  Science not only tells us nothing about the purpose of life, it can’t even tell us about the origins of scientific principles. “Scientific phenomena often demonstrate, as physics and cosmology tend to do, that the strangeness of reality consistently exceeds the expectations of science, and that the assumptions of science, however tried and rational, are very inclined to encourage false expectations.”

This is perhaps a starting point for a dialogue between believers and nonbelievers.  Robinson’s sentiments aren’t greatly different on this point from those of Albert Camus, who wrote in The Myth of Sisyphus, “You enumerate the earth’s laws and in my spirit for knowledge I admit that they are true.  You take apart its mechanism and my hope increases. At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multicolored universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good, and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus … You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry … So that science that was supposed to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis.”

* * *

Robinson, of course, is not a skeptic, as Camus was. She merely wishes to suggest, as she does in her 2012 book When I Was A Child I Read Books, that “For almost as long as there has been science in the West there has been a significant strain in scientific thought which assumed that the physical and material preclude the spiritual. The assumption persists among us still, rigorous as ever, that if a thing can be ‘explained,’ associated with a physical process, it has been excluded from the category of the spiritual. But the ‘physical’ in this sense is only a disappearingly thin slice of being, selected, for our purposes, out of the totality of being by the fact that we perceive it as solid, substantial.”  

Her purpose is to dispel the “notion that religion is intrinsically a crude explanatory strategy that should be dispelled and supplanted by science and is based on a highly selective or tendentious reading of the literatures of religion. In some cases it is certainly fair to conclude that it is based on no reading of them at all.” Broaden your mind to include the spiritual, and we may see that “We live on a little island of the articulatable, which we tend to mistake for reality itself.” 

In When I Was A Child, Robinson tells us “When I write fiction, I suppose my attempt is to stimulate the integrative work of a mind perceiving and reflecting, drawing upon culture, memory, conscience, belief or assumption, circumstance, fear, and desire – a mind shaping the moment of experience and response and then reshaping them both as narrative, holding one thought against another for the effect of affinity or contrast, evaluating and rationalizing, feeling compassion, taking offense.”  

Robinson regards When I Was A Child as “an archeology of my own thinking,” and the essays it contains are pointed to both secularists and fundamentalists.  To the former she notes, “The contempt of a writer such as H. L. Mencken for popular religion is simultaneous and identical with his contempt for women’s rights and his melancholy belief in the futility of efforts to improve the status of black people.” To the latter, “In my Bible, Jesus does not say ‘I was hungry and you fed me, though not in such a way as to interfere with free market principles.’”

I know little about Calvinism or the beauty of Protestant hymns or many other concerns that animate Robinson’s work.  Before I read and reread her entire oeuvre I hadn’t realized how someone whose background and outlook were so different from my own could lead me to see things in a different way – to both feel outrage at the abuse of our planet while also caring about a dog of no special consequence.  I don’t want to see Marilynne Robinson popping up on Bill Maher’s Real Time, where her voice is reduced to the merely rhetorical. But it’s a voice that I want to hear -- or overhear -- more often, one that reveals a soul which burns with a hard gem-like flame and needs to be added to our national dialogue.  

Allen Barra writes about books and film for Truthdig, the Atlantic, the Daily Beast, the Guardian, Salon, and the New Republic. He was recently cited by the National Arts and Journalism Awards for literary and film criticism.