A marvelous review of Marilynne Robinson's new book Home by Linda McCullough Moore—a fine writer in her own right (and also, full disclosure, treasured family friend).

re: books, grace, literature, writing

Andy:

Marilynne Robinson is in a category by herself, and that category is both fully staffed and up to any project. I hope this is gratuitous, but if you haven’t read the essays in The Death of Adam, neither sleep nor eat till you have remedied the oversight. Her first novel Housekeeping is what I think a book should be. And now writing in Home of the same people in the same time and place as in her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead, everything is different. These two books could not be less alike. And just because she can and perhaps must, Robinson has pages and pages of dialogue about theology here, people sitting on the porch as evening falls, discussing and dissecting the particulars. The reader slows his pace, he doesn’t want to miss a word. Theology as conversation. She’s pulled off the impossible. (I know whereof I speak.)

In all her work we have the writer as magician. She’s making a concoction of her own invention, and if she doesn’t know if it will turn the one who drinks it into a fairy princess or blow the place to smithereens, well, those are risks she is prepared to take on our behalf. Perhaps that hints at her distinctive. She has been the sort of reader in her life who knows the possibility of writing. She takes nothing lightly, but there is lilt and charm for all of that. She can be light precisely because she knows the stakes are high, because she has cared enough to take the measure of the thing. And, she has the requisite humility to say, “There are things worth believing.”