“I have never admired deference.” Marilynne Robinson is a stubborn nonconformist, and her new collection of essays confirms the distance between her combative ideas and the dominant values of the west. This is partly a matter of temperament. Her years as a novelist reflect her belief that character implies “consistency of a kind”, though never “predictability”. Character, she tells us, has “a palette or a music”, which may be both constraining and liberating. The music of her character is ordered by her lifelong allegiance to the traditions of Protestantism, theological and political, that created American Puritanism. Her commitment to this identity, in both historical and contemporary terms, is what drives her fiction and her cultural criticism.
Writing on behalf of the “wounded or discounted”, always Robinson’s preferred position, leads to a forceful defence of John Wycliffe and the Lollards, John Calvin, Oliver Cromwell or the 18th-century theologian Jonathan Edwards. This is hardly, as she concedes with satisfaction, a list that will satisfy the criteria of “hipness”. But she is not motivated by contrariness in her choice of heroes, still less by a romantic affection for the past: “Nostalgia falsifies.” Her purpose is to claim the respect for human potential, which she sees as the bedrock of Christianity, as a means of countering what she characterises as the “thinking that tends to devalue humankind, which is an influential tendency in modern culture”.
Again and again she attacks the kind of “cost-benefit analysis” or unthinking “self-interest” that undermines the responsibility of “the self as an intelligent moral actor”. She returns to the primacy of the individual that characterised early Protestantism, not as a vindication of the self-seeking economic competition that she sees as a corroding force in the public life of the west, but as an exacting personal obligation to seek the good of others.
An especially engaging essay, Grace and Beauty, considers the relation between Robinson’s theological position and her aesthetic practice. “The standard I use is strictly experiential.” The wish to reauthorise “experience, felt reality, as one important testimony to the nature of reality itself” is a reminder of her closeness to the traditions of dissenting spiritual autobiographies as testament to an authentic interpretation of our world. No preconceived or willed model for the novel can be a substitute for the strenuous work of the imagination, which is for Robinson always a consequence of a moral understanding of action. “Beauty disciplines,” she tells us, alluding to the “elegance of meaningful complexity” that underlies the achievements of the novel. Fiction grows from the irreducibly individual mind of the novelist. Thinking of Gilead, the 2004 novel that marked Robinson’s return to fiction after the brilliant success of Housekeeping in 1980, she explains that “for me the impetus behind the book was simply that it was in my mind. I have never written a novel for any other reason.”
Most of these uncompromising essays were composed as visiting lectures, delivered before Donald Trump’s election. Robinson’s veneration of Barack Obama, who is, like her, associated with the congregationalist United Church of Christ and shares many of her theological perspectives, makes for an elegiac undertow in this book. Her celebrated public conversation with him in 2015 is recalled as a point of high honour in her career as a novelist. But neither honours nor disappointment are what motivate her. Americans, she remarked to the president, tend to think “that the worst thing they can say is the truest thing”. For all her acerbic disdain for recent developments in US culture (“I am too old to mince words”), Robinson’s religion gives her a longer view. Though the political context is urgent (“We have surrendered thought to ideology”), it is not the point of what she is attempting. Her studies represent a call to seriousness, as Christians used to understand that term – not as an unsmiling severity, but a steady determination to look beyond our immediate worldly concerns.
Among the most affecting essays in this book is a disquisition, or perhaps sermon, on the nature of hope, considered (alongside faith and love) as one of the three “theological virtues”. Hope is to be distinguished “very sharply” from optimism, which is not in abundant supply in these essays. “Hope is loyalty.” Robinson urges her audience to stand by what makes us human – “creative, knowing, efficacious, deeply capable of loyalty”. The argument is sophisticated and persuasive. But the exhortations of sermons are alien to modern literary sensibilities. Her religious essays are removed from the provocative strangeness of her novels, which are grounded in the experience of dispossessed drifters and isolated eccentrics. They amply reward the reader’s attention, but their principal appeal lies in what they can tell us about the astonishing power of her fiction.
- What are We Doing Here? by Marilynne Robinson (Virago, £18.99). To order a copy for £16.14, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
