There is something puzzling about Marilynne Robinson’s place in American culture. It has to do with the way her admirers praise her bravery for writing Christian novels. At a time when American liberal Protestantism is thought to have irrecoverably surrendered its mid-century high ground, Robinson is taken to be one of those soldiers who loses radio contact with headquarters and continues to hold the territory. Her essays have squared up against neo-Darwinism, nuclear reprocessing, fiscal austerity and psychotherapy, while her novels are temporally sealed in small midwestern and western towns in the 1950s, when liberal Protestantism was still thick in the land.
But in a country that still self-identifies as 75 per cent Christian, does it really require the full measure of courage to write novels from a religious perspective? The protectiveness one senses among Robinson’s Christian readers seems misplaced. Robinson found an early admirer in Doris Lessing; President Barack Obama declares her books “changed” him; she has won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize; she teaches at the most prestigious writing workshop in America, and contributes the occasional Sunday sermon to the New York Times. The beauty of her prose is often cited as the reason for her worldly success, but it cannot be the only one.
One of the sources of Robinson’s appeal for American readers may be that she has dedicated herself to exposing the religious wiring she sees behind the secular circuitry of American culture. It is not simply that the country’s major writers—from Abraham Lincoln and Herman Melville to William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor—saturated their writing in biblical themes and imagery. It is also that Robinson still hears ordinary Americans, consciously or not, speaking scriptural language—words and phrases such as “soul,” “grace,” “awesome,” “broken heart,” “bearing witness” still circulate in American speech, though their religious overtones have faded. For Robinson, these words are evidence of an inheritance that her fiction seeks to recover. I suspect some of Robinson’s secular readers get a certain satisfaction from being invited to re-inhabit an enchanted world they or their ancestors left behind; or if they are farther from the source, they may experience the quickening of a voyeur, looking into the minds of fictional characters who believe, or struggle to believe, or struggle to make peace with their disbelief, in God.
Robinson’s new novel, Lila, is the third in a loose trilogy, which also includes her two previous novels, Gilead and Home. At the centre of the novels is John Ames, the minister in a small Iowa town in the 1950s. We first encountered Lila as a shadowy figure on the margins of Gilead; she is the younger wife of Ames and has a shadowy past. But in Lila Robinson takes us from her childhood in the Great Depression to when Lila first attracts the notice of Ames and quickly settles into a marriage with him. Lila does not narrate the novel as Ames did in Gilead, but Robinson hews so closely to her consciousness that we are very nearly locked into her perspective.
On the surface, Robinson’s novel seems to be preoccupied with moral questions. Will this young woman, whose past includes time spent in a whorehouse, be able to live as a proper wife in town? Will turning her back on her old life mean repudiating the drifters who cared for her as a child? These sorts of concerns are not foreign to Robinson, who in her essays and interviews defends many of the severer tenets of Calvinism. But in Lila, Robinson also refuses to indulge high-flown theological justifications or judgements. She seems to mock the very idea of devoting too much attention to the sort of questions Ames and his fellow minister and friend, Boughton, ponder on their porches, such as how American Protestants will ever convert the Chinese under Mao Zedong to Christianity. Robinson may be that rare thing—a fiery congregationalist—in her non-fiction, but her novels succeed by gently undermining the learnedness of the wise men, and showing how consciousness itself, in the case of Lila, can take on sacred properties. The novel has a Kierkegaardian edge: it examines “Christendom” from the vantage of an estranged outsider—the original position of the Christian—who exhibits more Christian qualities than many of the “Christians” she confronts.
The novels of Robinson’s trilogy are each set in motion by the crossing of a threshold: in Gilead and Home, a prodigal son returns home and creates tremors in the town. In Lila a woman steps inside a church to take shelter from the rain. Lila is curious about what goes on in churches, and suspicious as well. When she first visits the house of John Ames, Lila beguiles him with a question: “I just been wondering lately why things happen the way they do.” She has a curiosity that connects with Ames’s own wondering about the world: “She wasn’t getting religion, she just wanted to know what he was talking about,” writes Robinson. Lila is drawn to the Old Testament, where Ames favours the more forgiving landscape of the Gospels. When he sets Lila to read the Bible, Ames finds her attracted to the Books of Moses, which more closely conform to her experience of scavenging her way through the Depression. The Book of Ezekiel, which “talks a lot about whoring,” holds special fascination.
Much of the novel contains Lila’s reflections on her early youth before she met Ames. Her childhood is biblical in the full sense of the word. She is saved as a child by a woman named Doll, a rough-hewn character out of the Old Testament, who becomes her caretaker during their years roaming the Great Plains. Together they survive the years of the Dust Bowl and the Depression, “before everyone else started getting poorer and the wind turned dirty.” Along with a band of drifters, who barely know what country they are in, they work odd jobs and distrust most forms of charity. Lila feels allegiance toward these people. As for their prospects in the next world, as she later says in the novel, with a nod to Huck Finn, “If Doll was going to be lost forever, Lila wanted to be right there with her, holding to the skirt of her dress.”
Robinson has often succeeded in creating characters of heroic dimensions. In Gilead, there was John Ames’s grandfather, the righteous abolitionist, who could conduct conversations with God aloud in the kitchen. Lila’s caretaker Doll belongs in this company. She says few words, but she looms over the book as the representative of a different moral code. “Better you take it,” she says when she gives Lila the knife she is perpetually sharpening. “Wash it down good, and hide when you get a chance. Don’t you never use it unless you have to.” Despite her survivalist code, she wants more for Lila than she wants for herself. She sends Lila to school for a year—and tries to get her to marry a kind old man with some property. The last time Lila sees her protector she has been charged by a sheriff for killing a man (possibly one of Lila’s kin) who may or may not have tried to bring Lila back into the clan. Outside the courthouse, where Doll sits on a rocking chair awaiting trial, a crowd of Lila’s extended family circles the building, demanding tribal vengeance, in one of the most powerful and primal scenes in the novel.
The transience of life has consistently been one of Robinson’s great subjects. Lila is uncomfortable with the stable world her husband wishes to provide her; yet she prepares to accept it for the sake of the child she has with Ames. There are moments where she fiercely asserts her own sovereignty over Ames and his sedentary religion—as when she cleans up the graves of Ames’s ancestors in the cemetery: “Let’s see if he thinks it was God who scraped the moss of the headstone and put the ivy there.” But at the same time, Ames and Lila move toward a tender, if hesitant, form of intimacy: “She pretended he knew some of her thoughts, only some of them, the ones she would like to show him.” The final form of surrender to the town of Gilead will only come when Lila gives up the knife that Doll has bequeathed to her as her only true possession. (This is one of the few moments where the novel’s symbolism gets too heavy.)
At its best, Robinson’s writing can light up consciousness, and make even the most passing thoughts feel indelible. Her older sister in American literature is Emily Dickinson, who likewise dedicated herself to the proposition that “the brain is wider than the sky.” In one of the novel’s most stirring passages, Lila considers her own invisible passage through the world:
“Her name had the likeness of a name. She had the likeness of a woman, with hands but no face at all, since she never let herself see it. She had the likeness of a life, because she was all alone in it. She lived in the likeness of a house, with walls and a roof and a door that kept nothing in and nothing out. And when Doll took her up and swept her away, she had felt a likeness of wings. She thought, Strange as all this is, there might be something to it.” It’s the tentativeness of Lila’s existence, its overwhelming provisionality, that Robinson’s prose transforms into something precious. There is much theological agonising on the surface of her novels, but if Christendom never comes off very well, it’s because Robinson’s religious outpourings find more open channels in the grooves of her characters’ consciousnesses.
