April 2011
29 posts
Meeting Marilynne Robinson →
A great profile from The Economist, ca. Home.
The Psalms With Robert Alter and Marilynne... →
Robert “The Guy Who Taught Me How To Read the Pentateuch” Alter discusses translating the Psalms. Then Robinson discusses reading them. It’s kinda like knowing that the Clash once shared a stage with Prince.
Unfortunately, the first face that pops up on YouTube’s “Up Next” screen after this clip finishes is Bernard Henry-Levy’s. That sort of harshed my...
The Homecoming →
… and here is James Wood’s review of Home from 2008.
And here is James Wood drumming with his fingers while his adorable kid plays around in the background. Sort of sets his admiration for the Who’s Keith Moon in a new context.
Robinson seems to return Wood’s admiration. In one interview she mentions reading and enjoying his novel The Book Against God, because, you know,...
Acts of Devotion →
Speaking of James Wood, here is his lovely review of Gilead, from 2004 …
RSA Debate on “New” “Atheism” →
I’m so sick of typing those words. After reading the comments on this video, I begin to suspect that the whole (no-more-) New (-than-Herbert-Spenser) Atheist movement exists to give Internet trolling a new dimension of sanctimony.
I mean, philosophically literate, humanistic atheists are some of the awesomest people on earth. I prefer them to most religious people. I thank God for such...
2009 National Book Festival →
For the first twenty-eight minutes or so, she reads from Home, for those of you who like that sort of thing. (Me, I’d rather read the book my damn self.) But there’s a nice Q&A at the end.
Interview by William Storrar →
Robinson talks to the Director of the Center for Theological Inquiry at Princeton about a workshop she gave for theology students looking to write for a nonspecialized audience.
“Theology always needs to be written again,” she says at one point, sounding beautifully Barthian.
About the Curators
It’s been about a month now since we put this site together. If you’ve been wondering who to blame for this, here we are.
Christian Bell lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan with his lovely wife Beth and some cats. He is a web designer for a non-profit organization, a member of Westminster Presbyterian Church, and holds an MA in Educational Ministry from Calvin Theological Seminary. He occasionally...
The Tyranny of Petty Coercion (Extended Mix) →
The original, longer, and (I think) better version of ‘The Tyranny of Petty Coercion,’ which, truncated, appeared in Harpers in 2004 and in the last paperback printing of The Death of Adam. None of what she had to say in TDOA would have been complete without a full-throated condemnation of the Fraught Naughts, so this essay is essential.
Here is an instance: for some time the word “bashing” has...
Review of Annie Dillard's The Maytrees →
Robinson has sometimes mentioned Annie Dillard as one of the few contemporary writers she follows closely. If you scroll down here, you can read Robinson’s very insightful review of Annie Dillard’s 2007 novel The Maytrees, originally published in the now-defunct Washington Post Book World.
…Her language in this book can recall Gerard Manley Hopkins, both in its use of compression to...
Waiting to be Remembered →
This is from the Amherst alumni magazine. And it’s really, really good, besides being an invaluable account of the genesis of Mother Country, and the whole period Robinson spent reading every book mentioned in the footnotes to Marx’s Capital. (Yes, that happened.)
Judging from this, I would guess that Marilynne Robinson also signs a helluva yearbook. “Dear So-and-So, As often as...
My Western Roots →
When I was a child I read books. My reading was not indiscriminate. I preferred books that were old and thick and dull and hard. I made vocabulary lists. … Relevance was precisely not an issue for me. I looked to Galilee for meaning and to Spokane for orthodonture, and beyond that the world where I was I found entirely sufficient.
I tell my students that relevance is sought-for, imagined,...
That Highest Candle →
A 2007 review of American Religious Poems, a Library of America volume edited by Harold Bloom and Jesse Zuba. (I bet the division of labor there was as follows: Bloom: “I’ll huff and puff about ‘agons’ for five or ten pages and you’ll do all the hard stuff.” Zuba: “Yessir, Mr. Famous Literary Pundit!”)
As always, in Robinson’s nonfiction, she...
The Making of a King →
She’s done so much else, it’s easy to forget Robinson’s academic training is as a Shakespeare scholar. Here, from 2003, is a smart, tough reading of the Henry IV Part One-Henry IV Part Two-Henry V cycle. We often hear that Shakespeare read the Geneva Bible (as we hear that he read Golding’s Ovid), but we don’t often see readings of Shakespeare that trace the results...
Marilynne Robinson goes to Princeton
In my senior year of college, I set my heart on going to Princeton Theological Seminary for grad school. My then-fiancée (now wife) and I drove east the week of spring break to visit the PTS campus. And a beautiful campus it is, just as you imagine — all the way through the ivy vines slithering up the sides of those stately brick buildings. Although I ended up going to that other Calvinist...
Freed →
The last of Robinson’s NYT/NYTBR pieces so far: from 2005, a review of two books detailing the end of the slave trade in Britain. Robinson argues that the British have less ground for moral self-congratulation on this issue than they like to think, a running theme with her.
I’m assuming, having read this, that she finds less point in the famous witticism of Samuel...
Writers and the Nostalgic Fallacy →
I wondered how long it would take before my project of linking to all of Robinson’s New York Times work would run afoul of the Times’ strange new “paying for things” plan. This sparkling 1985 entry in that odd, tired discussion, “Why don’t Americans write political novels?”, knocks the props out from under the question and gets in a solid dig at Mr....
Beyond the Pale with Edgar Allan Poe →
Writers, like single friends invited to a dinner party, never match up with the people they’re “supposed” to. For example, here’s Marilynne Robinson enthusing over the author of “Ligeia:”
It seems to me, reading Poe, that his subject is the alienation of consciousness from experience by the estheticized, the idealized, the formal—an alienation not peculiar to colonial people but certainly...
WatchWe here at the MRAS are huge fans of Jon Stewart and The Daily Show, so it goes without saying that Marilynne Robinson’s appearance on the show last summer was an epochal event.
Working to Make Life Prettier →
Writing in 1986, Robinson views Ingerborg Lauterstein’s novel Vienna Girl with wary approval, while wondering, “Am I … alone in the view that psychic dwarfs are slightly overrepresented in contemporary letters?”
Somewhere, David Lynch is not amused.
Let’s Not Talk Down to Ourselves →
I love all of these old Robinson New York Times Book Review pieces, but I would, if asked, name this one without hesitation as my favorite. I re-read it before every school year to help me remember that I don’t have to talk down to my first-year English students, I don’t have to treat them as (God help us) “education consumers,” I don’t have to submit to the pedagogical trend that says books...
Growing Up Thankless →
Writing in the year of the Iron Lady’s third electoral victory, Robinson finds Margaret Drabble’s The Radiant Way to be the ugly quintessence of Thatcherism.
The figures in the realist foreground are Liz Headland, a fashionable psychiatrist; Esther Breuer, an art historian; and Alix Bowen, a minor functionary in the good-doing sector. … The novel insists that we identify with them. They are...
A Nasty, Empty, Dangerous Word (Homogeneity) →
One thing I love to pieces about Robinson’s vision — and one reason I find myself contributing happily to this archive, even when I worry about coming off like that fellow who molests Dylan’s trashcan — is her total imperviousness to myths of “authenticity,” to “deep roots,” and to ideas that set ersatz against “real” Americans. Before reading her, I had never realized how deeply this dichotomy is...
The Guilt She Left Behind →
From 1990, an insightful and informed rave for Joyce Carol Oates’s Because It is Bitter, and Because It is My Heart:
The vision of Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart is a kind of mystical agnosticism, too dazzled by the flow of experience to risk interpretation, or even to make secure distinctions between things that are normally opposed, like truth and falsehood, pleasure and...
A Colony of the Disgruntled →
Writing in 1988, Robinson seems unimpressed with Edna O’Brien’s The High Road, despite its lyric brilliance:
Ms. O’Brien’s rich prose is laid on the surface of her narrative like the flourishes of technical brilliance that fade last when the vision of an age begins to slide away. The emptiness at the core of this tale is not the Romantic isolation from which it borrows phrases...
The Family Game Was Revenge →
Writing in 1986, Marilynne Robinson lets us know what separates Peter Taylor from so many Southern novelists. In so doing, she gives a succinct description of something that’s always bothered me in Faulkner, O’Connor, Percy, and the rest of the gang:
Southern writing often seems to me cloyed with the fusty apologetics of 19th-century reaction, to be indebted a little too deeply to...
At Play in the Backyard of the Psyche →
A funny and mostly positive review of John Updike’s Trust Me, from 1987. Updike shows “authority and also humor and elegance and honesty and generosity of spirit” in these stories; on the other hand, he is “a writer whose intuitions concerning women I would never call unerring.” Heh.
Language is Smarter Than We Are →
A brilliant New York Times Book Review piece from 1987. “I think it is past time,” Robinson writes, “to put aside other business and to turn our energies to the remystification of virtually everything. I am as firmly persuaded as anyone that things can be explained, or usefully described, but I am convinced that our methods at this point are crude, and premature, and that they lead us to ignore...
Marilynne Robinson, Narrative Calvinist →
One of the pillars of Robinson’s writing — fiction and non-fiction alike — is her pitch-perfect articulation of Calvinism. Thomas Gardner, writing in Christianity Today, explores the role of Calvin in Robinson’s works, particularly Gilead and Home.
