Marilynne Robinson has written a book about the Bible. Of course, all of her books, to varying extents, are about the Bible. But this one, for lack of a better way to say it, is really about the Bible. Reading Genesis is, as its title suggests, a sustained work of Biblical exegesis, and makes a claim to being Robinson’s grandest and most explicit theological gesture to date—and, given the fact Robinson just entered her ninth decade, perhaps her last. It’s a shame that it’s such a muddle.
Even the slightest rumbling of a new book from Robinson is enough to cause an avalanche of perfunctory praise, simply because she is a novelist who deals with religious issues, and who happens not to be Mitch Albom. As usual with this kind of acclaim, some measure of it is earned. Robinson’s novels do at times reflect a preternatural sensitivity to the ways religious problems play out in American lives, but only in the odd moments when they aren’t forcing their thinly realized characters to act out hackneyed theological dialogues.
“Theology and religion are not synonyms,” Robinson writes in her 2018 essay collection What Are We Doing Here? “Either can exist without the other, and either is diminished in the absence of the other.” This is, probably, true in life. But it isn’t necessarily true in fiction. The moments I’ve been most uncomfortable reading Robinson’s diligently life-affirming fiction have been those times when I’ve sensed theology, like a rough beast, breathing down my neck. Religion seems to me the proper province of the novel, and even Robinson’s own definition would appear to support this claim. “By religion I mean the individual and communal embrace of the particulars of a faith, or loyalty or affinity to it that might not involve thoroughgoing belief in every article of its creed,” she explains.
Religion, then, is the human inflection we put on a structure of belief, the collection of improvisations we spin around a particular doctrine. Robinson the religious writer is charming, sensitive, marvelously attuned to the vagaries of the human soul. In contrast, Robinson the theological writer is stern, cold, utterly at peace inflicting on her fictional creations all the cruelties of her chosen dogma. Keeping the two straight is often a challenge, not only for the reader, but—more and more, it would seem—for Robinson herself.
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This late in the game, it seems clear that Housekeeping, Robinson’s first novel, will be the best book she ever writes. It’s not only a slim masterpiece, but a key to her religious thinking, composed at a time when Robinson was perhaps less certain of her religious theories, to the fiction’s great benefit. Still, like most of her work, the novel is heavily indebted to the works of John Calvin, the sixteenth-century French theologian and religious reformer who spent nearly three decades preaching the glories of Protestantism from an exiled perch in Geneva.
Calvin is a profoundly analogic writer, and Housekeeping is infused with his ideas and their accordant images, especially his pet favorite: a description of physical reality as a mirror in which we can glimpse, reflected, the grandeur and mystery of God. Calvin had a particular predilection for this image—by most accounts it appears more than thirty times in his Institutes of the Christian Religion. Robinson, aware of this habit, has written that “Calvin will use the image of the mirror almost obsessively…to describe a state of being that is experiential, fluid, momentary and relational, and which reveals, without in any sense limiting or becoming identical with the thing revealed.” It is an odd sort of pantheistical revelation, in which the self slurs toward an ontological limit, so that, as Robinson continues, “the natural world mirrors God, a human being mirrors God.”
In Housekeeping this metaphor is embodied in the “mirroring waters of Lake Fingerbone,” the lake that abuts the novel’s fictional setting of Fingerbone, Idaho. Early on, Robinson describes the lake’s habitual springtime flooding. “A narrow pond would form in the orchard, water clear as air covering grass and black leaves and fallen branches,” the book’s narrator, Ruth, observes, “and on it, slight as an image in an eye, sky, clouds, trees, our hovering faces and our cold hands.” As the novel progresses, the lake becomes a loaded social and theological image. It is a collecting place, gathering the town’s dead, rendering absent bodies present. Above all, it is an abiding, immanent presence, at once placid and vengeful—like the God of Calvin, both deterministic (if you were to die in Fingerbone, this would be where you’d do it) and utterly inscrutable.
The verbal resources Robinson lavishes on Fingerbone and its environs are outsize, wonderfully gratuitous, suggesting some nearly supernatural level of linguistic foison. We read Housekeeping, of course, for the sacral character of its prose, the liturgical drive that seeks to praise the smallest miracles, to celebrate the ordinary. As Robinson understands it, this is a deeply American theme. “The most persistent and fruitful tradition of American literature from Emily Dickinson to Wallace Stevens,” Robinson writes in her 2015 essay collection The Givenness of Things, “is the meditation on the given, the inexhaustible ordinary.” During a prolonged period of flooding, Fingerbone is “strangely transformed,” comminuted into countless small miracles:
If one should be shown odd fragments arranged on a silver tray and be told, “That is a splinter from the True Cross, and that is a nail parding dropped by Barabbas, and that is a bit of lint from under the bed where Pilate’s wife dreamed her dream,” the very ordinariness of the things would recommend them.
Robinson’s religion is a practice of attention; the novel’s setting merely makes this attention easier—perhaps, for those with the eyes to see, unavoidable. “So Fingerbone, or such relics as it showed above the mirroring waters,” Robinson goes on, “seemed fragments of the quotidian held up to our wondering attention, offered somehow as proof of their own significance.”
By contrast, Calvin’s image of the world as a grand theater, with the glory of God a play we humans are all acting out, looms larger in Robinson’s second novel, Gilead. “Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience,” as the book’s narrator, John Ames, explains. “That metaphor has always interested me, because it makes us artists of our behavior, and the reaction of God to us might be thought of as aesthetic rather than morally judgmental in the ordinary sense.” There is a complacency, a certainty here that hits the ear in a funny, fundamentally unconvincing way. The image isn’t inhabited or enacted—it is explained; it is preached. In general, the theological observations that stipple Gilead are characterized by a strange one-offness, a lack of depth, that might best be explained by the fact that they are observations, rather than experiences. Where Housekeeping feels like a religious book, Robinson’s later novels can too often feel like theological books—sturdier in their claims, more insistent in their vision, more heavy-handed and blatant in their treatment of their inheritance.
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Another curious aspect of Robinson’s career is that, for a long time after Housekeeping, she could have been described as a non-fiction writer who once wrote a novel. Nine years would pass before Robinson published another book. Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State and Nuclear Pollution was, to say the least, not what a fan of Housekeeping might have expected. All told, the book is an odd intervention, as Robinson herself acknowledges in the introduction:
This book is essentially an effort to break down some of the structures of thinking that make reality invisible to us. These are monumental structures, large and central to our civilization. So my attack will seem ill-tempered and eccentric, a veering toward anarchy, the unsettling emergence of lady novelist as petroleuse.
Compared to the hazy, liberalistic paeans that stipple her later essays, Mother Country is refreshingly pugilistic. The book, which attacks the operation of Sellafield, a nuclear reprocessing plant located on the coast of the Irish Sea, swings out wildly, catching targets left and right. On one level, it’s an investigation of the English national character, its elevation of reasonableness to a cardinal virtue, and the “enormous moral security” this fosters. It’s also a wide-ranging assertion of the centrality to British culture of Poor Law—the system of laws, dating back to the medieval period, that dealt with relief to the poor, often by restricting their freedom of movement. Though revised in the 1940s into the nation’s modern welfare state, Poor Law persists in British society, Robinson argues, as a cruel ideological residue.
“The structures of institutions express conceptions of society,” Robinson writes. “Sellafield amounts, in its dinosaur futurism, to a brutal laying of hands on the lives of people: a blunt, unreflecting assertion of power.” The driving ideology behind the creation and continued existence of Sellafield, Robinson suggests, “is the same unchallenged assertion of economic prerogative that legally immobilized the majority of the British population for five hundred years, so that the cost of relieving their wretchedness, when wretchedness became extreme, could be contained.” There is a rot at the center of the culture, in other words, that allows it to sign off on acts of violence and submit the poorest segments of its population to blatant poisoning, on the understanding that they will have no way to object, no recourse to revolt.
It’s a damning, cleareyed conclusion. And it’s nothing like what you’ll find in Robinson’s later nonfiction, which by and large reflects a steady embourgeoisement of her concerns. The attack on a debased culture that lends Mother Country, for all its repertorial pedantry, a sense of fiery propulsion, has been volatilized into the realm of pure thought. Starting with The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought, published in 1998, Robinson began to rehearse the theories that would occupy her nonfiction for the next quarter century. A more antagonistic preposition would have been fitting, since what the book collects are mostly essays against modern thought. More specifically, Robinson’s targets are positivist schools of thought, like Freudianism, Marxism, and Darwinisim, which she glosses as “the philosophical or ethical system that has claimed to be implied by evolution.” Having gone unchecked for too long, as she argues, these systems of thought have contributed to a host of troubling symptoms at the cultural level, among them the death of inwardness and our impoverished sense of morality. There’s plenty of merit to the project, which is apt to strike modern readers as a totem against the technocratic 1990s, a decade that, among other crimes against the marketplace of ideas, saw the laundering of Social Darwinist theories in works like Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve.
At the same time, the book represents a widening and ossification of Robinson’s concerns. The broad strokes of Robinson’s arguments about modern thought draw on the work of Charles Taylor, and more specifically, his text Sources of the Self, from 1989. Like much of Robinson’s more abstract criticism, Taylor’s book is concerned with “modern inwardness,” that is, “the sense of ourselves as beings with inner depths.” The thin sense of self afflicting many modern individuals, as Taylor argues, stems in part from a crisis of authority in the way we structure morality. “Selfhood and the good, or in another way selfhood and morality,” he writes, “turn out to be inextricably intertwined themes.” The resonances between Taylor’s thought and Robinson’s are obvious, and I’d be shocked if Robinson hadn’t read Sources of the Self and thought deeply on it.
And yet, you won’t find any mentions of Taylor in Robinson’s writings, an elision that exemplifies a strange tic of her nonfiction. (The citation-dodging and concept-cribbing is everywhere, once you start to notice it; she clearly gets her concept of givenness from the Catholic theologian Jean-Luc Marion, for instance.) Robinson prides herself on dealing with primary texts, a methodological approach that seems to have begun as a defense mechanism. As an apologist for the often witheringly cool theology of Calvin and the abundantly stereotyped severities of Puritan thought, Robinson is constantly on the lookout for ways to peel back the centuries of cultural baggage that have been heaped on these figures; in an effort at defamiliarization, she even goes so far as to refer to the founder of Calvinism by his French name, Jean Calvin.
Still, in most of Robinson’s nonfiction, it’s clear that she’s read plenty of secondary literature, that she’s familiarized herself with the current debates on her topic, whatever it may be. But she never really cops to this preparation; there are no direct citations, and few direct targets. This is part of the strangeness of Reading Genesis, which deals with one of the most commented-on texts in history. You might argue that, at least in Robinson’s essays, there’s something of Christian charity in her refusal to name names, to put her intellectual enemies on blast. And it’s also true that many of the essays in Robinson’s later collections were written as speeches and sermons, in the context of which a flood of references would obviously be a bit unwieldy. Justified somewhere between Protestant ideas of direct access and Emersonian self-reliance, Robinson’s aversion to secondary sources positions her as an original font of wisdom, and asks her readers to believe, even if just for a moment, that she’s derived everything from first principles all by herself.
As an intellectual and stylistic tic, it can also lead to an uncomfortable generality in her arguments, as though Robinson weren’t engaging with the culture directly, but pontificating from on high. When it comes to a book like Reading Genesis, this posture makes sense, even if it can feel a little odd at times; what’s been missed, I think, is that the grandstanding nature of Reading Genesis is, in many ways, the culmination of Robinson’s nonfiction style.
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Robinson’s nonfiction has addressed a gamut of issues, from the “long scenes of gratuitous pardon” that typify the final acts of Shakespeare’s later plays to the neoliberalization and asset stripping of the American university. But one constant has been her hostility to any intellectual framework that bears the imprint of positivism. Just why this should be so is obvious in part, since these schools of thought have historically been anti-religious, if not aggressively atheistic. But it’s also true that, for entirely other reasons, Robinson has needed an intellectual bogeyman to rail against.
“Positivist science,” as she writes in her 2015 essay collection The Givenness of Things, “resembles pre-Reformation theology in its drive to unite all knowledge in one vocabulary of description.” It’s not just that positivist thought is vaguely religious in its claims to offering a totalizing vision of reality, but that it models a toxic, authoritarian version of religion, one that we have outgrown as a species. The implication is that there is a certain give in post-Reformation theology, and it would be hard to argue that on one level this isn’t true—take, for instance, the egalitarianism engendered by the sola scriptura doctrine, which holds that scripture is the only final authority in matters of faith and practice. But Robinson isn’t offering as fully liberated a vision of selfhood as it may seem at first blush.
What she means to suggest is that while the concepts of election and predestination are stark and cruelly deterministic, they are not as stark and cruelly deterministic as, say, Freudianism. She says as much, writing of “the determinist, even mechanistic implications of positivism, a determinism more constraining than either original sin or predestination.” There are, we take it, gentler forms of determinism. As she’s attacked positivist ideologies, remaining careful all the while to inscribe limits of her own, Robinson has also championed individual mental experience as centrally constitutive of reality. The central assumption of the main schools of modern thought, as she contends in Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self, “is that the experience and testimony of the individual mind is to be explained away, excluded from consideration when any rational account is made of the nature of human being and of being altogether.” She takes this a step further, writing that “the renunciation of religion in the name of reason and progress has been strongly associated with a curtailment of the assumed capacities of the mind.” Her aim is one of “reauthorizing experience, felt reality, as one important testimony to the nature of reality itself,” as she writes in What Are We Doing Here?
Just how this reauthorization of “the mind as felt experience” is supposed to create a better world is a little unclear. I imagine Robinson means to suggest that, contra positivist schools of thought, we are not fundamentally tribalistic, or economic, or self-regarding creatures, but that perhaps we are really, fundamentally, moral creatures. As she writes in The Givenness of Things, “for the positivist model of reality humanity itself is not really a given.” Let us assume that humanity is a given, Robinson wants to suggest, and we will likely hold ourselves to a higher interpersonal standard; we will refuse to allow other human beings to be subjected to violence of all sorts, be it physical, economic, environmental, and so on. If this moral mechanism worked, you’d figure Robinson herself would be a better case study.
It’s hard not to sense in Robinson’s literary project a whiff of failed radicalism. In many of her essays, she attempts a redefinition of the history of the United States, moving away from a tradition that, in her words, “legitimizes rapacious capitalism as preeminently American.” She is constantly expressing her pride in the radical tradition of the Middle West, and can often be found pointing up the Christian roots of American abolitionism. Her frequent apologias for Calvinism and Puritanism in particular usually connect America’s history of radical progressive politics to these particular religious influences. “Calvin’s influence is strongly, even uniquely, associated with potent activism,” as she writes, for instance, in What Are We Doing Here? But more and more Robinson’s public statements have tended to emphasize a broadminded civic rhetoric and a wishy-washy liberalism that seem a far cry from the radicalism evinced in early works like Mother Country. “There is no group in history I admire more than the abolitionists,” she has written, “but from their example I conclude that there are two questions that we must always ask ourselves—what do we choose not to know, and what do we fail to anticipate?”
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“Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion,” as James Baldwin wrote, “is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.” It’s hardly a harsh judgment when applied, as Baldwin’s words originally were, to the bargain-rate bathos of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, though I admit it can seem a little rough to direct it at Robinson’s far subtler and studiously open-minded fiction.
Gilead, Robinson’s second novel, was released in 2004 to immediate, raucous acclaim. Looking back, there seem to be at least a handful of obvious reasons America was primed to receive Robinson’s fiction-coated preachments. There is, of course, the long fictional silence, itself a newsworthy phenomenon in a literary culture that tends to be defined by steady, workmanlike strivers and prolificity of the Updikean sort. As a bonus, or corollary to this, readers were offered the chance to rediscover Housekeeping, which, as even her critics will admit, is clearly some sort of masterpiece. And then there’s the fact that the book’s clear-eyed emotionalism and sincere treatment of religious themes must have seemed like some sort of antidote to the irony poisoning of the 1990s. All of these factors, working separately or together, seem to have obscured the fact that Gilead simply isn’t a very good book.
As with all of Robinson’s writing, there are moments of demotic flare, charged phrasings that bear a homegrown edge and which, like a dollar-store afflatus, breathe something resembling life into the generally lukewarm putty of her prose. But this hardly makes up for the book’s many weaknesses, among which are a tendency to devolve into sentimental schlock and a loosely associative structure that flirts with sheer randomness. The novel’s very premise—an old man on the groundsill of death writing letters to his young son, who he surely won’t live to see grow up—should have raised various craft-related alarm bells, requiring some gambit to ward off bathos. Robinson’s solution, if you can call it that, was to lean into her narrator’s earnestness. “Robinson’s pastor is that most difficult narrator from a novelist’s point of view,” as James Wood observed in a contemporary review, “a truly good and virtuous man.” In fact, John Ames is supremely, blessedly, naggingly good. At its core, his faith seems never to have been genuinely tested, which is all well and good—a religious novel can dramatize a crisis of faith, but it can just as well confine itself to describing a life lived within faith. And yet, even the smaller beliefs that make up his faith have a prefab pristinity about them—they seem weakly forged, if forged at all.
Robinson’s commitment to limning what, in Home, her character Glory refers to as “the intimacy of the ordinary,” naturally exposes her to a rampant sentimentality. But for whatever reason, critics have tended to give her a pass on her novels’ persistent soppiness. I’d wager this punch-pulling has something to do with the fact that Robinson’s novels foreground religion; before ravaging one of Robinson’s more roseate set pieces, a non-religious critic might be inclined to concede that perhaps this is simply what the world looks like when viewed through faithful eyes. And then, the novels have a built-in shock absorber, circling as they do around one of the more horrifying religious doctrines ever concocted—namely, predestination. Given the cruelty of this doctrine, and Robinson’s commitment to depicting it, it would seem that the occasional whiff of schmaltz would have to be forgiven. In the final tally, they must be serious books, since they deal with this terrifying religious truth.
But Robinson, not ordinarily one to duck out when a theological issue of dire import is on the table, is in fact remarkably cagey when it comes to the matter of predestination. Even a critic as sympathetic as James Wood, in his recent review of Reading Genesis, admits that Robinson “tends to pass over” what he calls “Calvin’s signature terror.” Her fictional spokespeople have a habit of brushing it off as a great mystery, the sort of thing that makes sense to God but that our standard human minds can’t wrap themselves around. Take Lila, the wife of John Ames, and the protagonist of 2014’s Lila, who finds herself haunted by the certainty that the people who helped her during her years of vagrancy—chief among them the woman, Doll, who rescued her from an abusive home as a child—are not among the elect. These concerns, as legitimate within the Calvinistic worldview as they are torturous, are batted away with sophistries. “If the Lord is more gracious than any of us can begin to imagine, and I’m sure He is,” Ames assures her at one point, “then your Doll and a whole lot of people are safe, and warm, and very happy.” It would be one thing if Ames were being duplicitous here; in fact, there’d be an electrifying pathos in his twisting the theological truth—lying, in other words—to comfort the woman he loves. Unfortunately, he’s entirely sincere. He seems to be convinced that so lovely a soul as Lila’s could never have so much as grazed one of the damned—as though the force of her goodness had flushed all preterition from the world.
It’s one of many instances in Robinson’s fiction when the problem of predestination is warded off with sophistries—though, admittedly, these moments aren’t as frequent as you might expect. Reading Robinson’s fiction, you often get the sense that she’s dodging the question, that she’s circling about the black hole of perdition that lies at the heart of her theology, trying to find an oblique way into the problem that, confronted head-on, would give the lie to her generous humanism. It’s one reason the emphases in her novels are typically all off. Take Home, for instance, which focuses on Glory, the daughter of Reverend Robert Boughton, and her brother Jack. A follow-up to Gilead that revisits many of the same events from a different perspective, Home is ultimately a novel about Glory’s displacement, her sense that, after a failed romance, she has returned to the familial hearth, only to reside there “on sufferance.” She has, belatedly, been revealed as the second black sheep of the family—her lostness is not even unique, and is in fact overshadowed by Jack’s exemplary lostness. Like a moon around the moons of Jupiter, Glory experiences a peripherality that is itself peripheral—which makes the grieving of it all the more complex. This second-order estrangement would be an interesting arrangement, novelistically speaking, if Glory were the only one who felt this way. And yet Robinson herself proves comfortable shunting Glory off to the side of her own novel. It’s painfully obvious, throughout Home, that Robinson wants to be writing about Jack.
Jack, the quintessential prodigal son, is the raison d’être of the Gilead quartet. He is, as far as we or any of Robinson’s characters can tell, among the damned, a victim of what Herman Melville, in Pierre, glossed as “that most true Christian doctrine of the utter nothingness of good works.” As a character, he is an unstable dramatic engine, the problem over which Robinson can’t stop fretting. His appearance relatively late in Gilead provides the novel with its central dramatic tension, and his presence in a given entry in the series functions as a reliable gauge of the book’s quality. Lila, the worst of the bunch, is bad (in part) because it features the least of Jack, while Jack, for the obvious and opposite reason, is, to my mind, the best. There is an ease, a naturalness to the book, even on the level of its sentences, that’s absent from its predecessors; Robinson, you feel, is precisely where she wants to be, perched on the shoulder of her lost lamb.
Jack, as a locus of the problem of predestination, absorbs more than his fair share of authorial and readerly attention. But predestination, for good or bad, is at the heart of all of Robinson’s characters. In these novels, the good man is good because he’s good, not because he’s struggled with evil and come out on top. Can anyone, having read Gilead, honestly doubt that John Ames is destined for grace, that Lila, his uncomfortably white-trash-coded, late-in-life wife is headed for the same place of perpetual bliss? Their electness is a foregone conclusion. As for the bad man—well, the bad man is hard to find, because Jack, of course, is not bad, per se. He’s simply a bit of a fuck-up; he’s simply a human being, albeit one living under a cloud, his self-doubt augmented by the knowledge that his ordinary human failings signify, or are the result of, his a priori damnation. When the books’ other characters are forced to consider his self-evident perdition, things get wishy-washy real fast; the matter is dodged, artfully or clumsily, and Jack is left to get on with his life, in which he can do nothing right—and in which, even if he could, it wouldn’t matter.
I don’t want to argue that Jack is necessarily damned, through and through, or that this is Robinson’s direct intent. In fact, there is something clearly (if partially) redemptive about Jack’s habit, throughout the Gilead quartet, of paying careful attention to the natural world. Jack is a great noticer; his senses, with a sort of hangdog casualness, pick out the world’s chastened beauties. In the course of wooing his future wife Della—a young Black teacher, and the daughter of a prominent minister in St. Louis—Jack describes a particular tree in the city’s white cemetery, capturing something vital about its flourishing:
He said, “I only ask because there is a tree there, a really huge old tree. I’ve probably walked by it a hundred times without noticing anything about it. But one time I happened to look back, and I saw blossoms all over it. Seriously. Big sort of golden-colored blossoms, each one upright, like it was floating on something. And I thought that was an amazing thing. The leaves hide them. But from a certain distance, there they are. I thought that was interesting.”
In theological terms, we might read this tendency of Jack’s as a form of natural revelation—that is, God’s willingness and ability to reveal Himself through His creation, the natural world. In the American tradition, the Puritans were the great conveyors of this revelatory model. “The Puritans spoke of their religion as experimental, that is, experiential,” Robinson writes in What Are We Doing Here? “Sacredness is realized in the act of attention because reality is communicative and the mind is made, grace assisting exquisite effort, to experience its meaning.” But there’s a false note here, one that can be difficult to pick out at first, though Robinson’s grammatical clunkiness does provide a fateful assist. Grace assisting exquisite effort, she’s not overly careful to shoehorn in. Pay as much attention as you want, in other words, to the splendor of God’s creation—if you ain’t got that (graceful) swing, it don’t mean a thing.
That the problem of predestination is never solved or confronted directly is, of course, fine as far as Robinson’s fiction is concerned. Predestination really is an intractable theological knot, and if it were directly on the table, it’s hard to imagine it wouldn’t act as a structural black hole, dragging the novels into a bland schematization. I’m willing to grant that the necessities of fiction-writing mean that theological niceties must go relatively unarticulated. But what’s disturbing to find is that, even in Robinson’s non-fiction, the problem of predestination is treated with the same gesture. Having read all of Robinson’s non-fiction—to date six volumes, not including Reading Genesis—the closest I’ve come to finding a direct approach to the matter is a short aside in an essay collected in The Death of Adam. “For Calvinism, we are all absolutely, that is equally, unworthy of, and dependent upon, the free intervention of grace,” Robinson writes. “This is a harsh doctrine, but no harsher than others, since Christian tradition has always assumed that rather few would be saved, and has differed only in describing the form election would take.”
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To complain that Reading Genesis retreads ground that Robinson has already pulverized underfoot seems to misdescribe the problem, which is that her mode of analysis remains, for the most part, half-baked, evasive, and painfully numinous.
Everyone agrees the Bible is a drastically composite text. “Unity is not an attribute of the Bible, Jewish or Protestant,” as Harold Bloom has written. “Tanakh is gathered from more than a thousand years of Hebrew literature, and the criteria for selection seem to me to have been surprisingly aesthetic.” Most scholars would agree that the Bible, as it comes down to us, is extremely heterogeneous as well. Comprised of “genealogical registers, catalogues, blessings and curses, protocols for the conclusion of covenants, doxological and mythological texts, etiological tales, legal directives,” as J.P. Fokkelman writes, “it exhibits a baffling multiformity.”
Robinson cares about precisely none of this. As other reviewers have pointed out, Reading Genesis is less a work of scholarship or a literary treatment of scripture than an expression of deep piety. It is first and foremost the work of a believer, one who’s more than willing to force an artificial unity on the text. In The New Republic, for instance, Briallen Harper writes that despite its “smoothness and elegance” there is “a slightly claustrophobic quality” to Robinson’s reading of Genesis. “Nothing is unintended; nothing is wasted; everything tends toward the same predestined end.” It’s a streamlined and often doctrinaire approach; claims that might otherwise require a bit of scholarly backing, as Harper continues, “are neither argued for nor bolstered with sources but simply stated as truth.”
Among these is the Panglossian argument that “God is good, and so is the world,” and that, in line with a Providential reading of history, there is an order and telos to historical events that human beings are unable to perceive, but that they must trust in. Compared to works like The Epic of Gilgamesh and the Enuma Elish, as Robinson argues, Genesis models a peculiarly benign cosmos. “Against this background of ambient myth, to say that God is the good creator of a good creation is not a trivial statement,” Robinson writes. “The insistence of Genesis on this point, even the mention of goodness as an attribute of the Creation, is unique to Genesis.” It’s a simple claim and a familiar one, but we shouldn’t lose sight of its brazenness. Phil Christman, for instance, writing in The Bulwark, describes the book’s rather peremptory assumption of “the idea that God’s intentions are both good and finally all-determining” as “jarring.”
So God is good—but also, of course, He isn’t. Throughout Reading Genesis, Robinson is at pains to differentiate the Judeo-Christian God from other ancient deities, often by underscoring the senseless cruelty these false gods inflict on their followers. Of course, God as we know him is often senselessly cruel, but in Reading Genesis Robinson seems unwilling, or unable, to cede this very basic point. I take her implicit argument to be that God may seem to be cruel from time to time, but that we can’t really describe this cruelty as senseless because there is a purpose to it, albeit one we will never comprehend. Functionally speaking, this means God’s cruelty is senseless, unless you have faith. That this is a handy mechanism for quietism, for brushing away the complexities of all sorts of harrowing narratives, seems to be something Robinson would rather ignore.
Robinson’s vision of a “God both above and within time, His providence reaching across unnumbered generations” isn’t idiosyncratic by any means, nor are its consequences. “The character of everything, good fortune and bad,” as she writes, “is changed when its ultimate meaning awaits the great unfolding of His intention.” One result of this “is that we do not know how to judge or where to blame because events are working themselves out at another scale and toward other purposes more than we can begin to grasp.” The simplest objections to this worldview haven’t lost any of their luster—for starters, it’s simply a breed of relativism. Proponents of a Providential worldview might argue, as Robinson has in the past, that because we do not know how to judge, we are far more likely to withhold judgment—we will be kinder, in other words, more understanding and forgiving of our fellow human beings. Maybe that’s true, and maybe it isn’t, but it at least seems to me that, outside the sphere of abstract moral argumentation, there are plenty of instances when judging another might be useful—might, in fact, be the humane thing to do. Since, under the auspices of Providence, each of us has a unique and vital role to play in the unfolding of God’s plan, it’s often claimed as well that the doctrine elevates and sanctifies the individual. Though then again, if our actions don’t matter, it would seem just as likely to debase the individual.
As fond as Robinson is of extolling the importance of individual experience, she’s often just as willing to discard it. “Scripture, which purports to be history, is mainly impatient with interiority,” as Cynthia Ozick has written. “It is God, we are told, who hardens Pharaoh’s heart, and after this no more need be said.” Novelists, for the most part, will have different priorities, scrounging about as they must for glimmers of the inner life. And yet Robinson seems singularly uninterested in psychology, even though, historically, this has proven fruitful exegetical terrain—consider Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, or Auerbach’s stylistic treatment of the Odyssey and the Old Testament in Mimesis, both of which center on the aqedah, or the Binding of Isaac. Robinson’s treatment of the moment is pale in comparison, while at other times she seems to flee from interpretation with a guilty-seeming celerity. What are we to make, for instance, of the fact that for all intents and purposes Cain, after murdering his brother Abel, gets away with it? As Robinson herself cedes, “God’s great leniency toward Cain does seem to ask for some kind of explanation, or sense of circumstance.” And yet, she continues, “rationalizing what God does invokes the risk of losing its difficulty and otherness to human expectations.” The takeaway of the Bible’s treatment of this episode, she contends, is “that mercy is nearer than justice to Godliness, and that mercy can release an abundance far exceeding whatever might come of attempting to impose justice as we mortals understand that word.”
This is pablum. There is something deflating about the paradoxes Robinson points out and the payoff she wrings from them, which usually takes the form of an instructive sermonette, the sort that would fit snugly on a sampler. Genesis, as Robinson contends, is an utterly foreign text that beggars human comprehension—but prod it once or twice, and like a vending machine it will spurt out the milkiest of moral maxims. “From antiquity,” Robinson observes in Absence of Mind, “insistence on the ontological unlikeness of God to the categories to which the human mind has recourse is at the center of theological reflection.” And yet Robinson demonstrates very little of the negative capability you’d expect from a supposedly profound religious thinker; she rarely resides in uncertainty for long, and seems unwilling to grapple with the hard truths her thinking turns up, the consequences of a particularly sere theology. Even then, her chintzy exegeses are hardly as humanity-affirming as they might initially seem. “There is an austere final judgment or a hard kernel lurking inside each of her apparently gentle evaluations,” as Wood writes.
What’s been strange is to witness all of the reviews of Reading Genesis brushing the book aside as a bit of a folly; its errors are extraterritorial, not to be connected with Robinson’s fiction. But Robinson’s novels are widely regarded as excellent works of fiction because they are religiously-minded novels, texts concerned with the working out, however tacitly, of a theological vision. Given this fact, Reading Genesis deserves to be read as an intensely relevant piece of Robinson’s oeuvre; when it makes for uncomfortable reading, we have a duty not to turn away.
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For the non-religious reader, of course, reading theology is a bit like watching a complicated card game without knowing the rules—something is obviously happening, and there certainly seem to be incentives and strategies dictating the action, but a full grasp of the workings of it all remains beyond us. Robinson herself admits as much. “Great theology is always a kind of giant and intricate poetry, like epic or saga,” she writes in The Death of Adam. “It is written for those who know the tale already, the urgent messages and the dying words, and who attend to its retelling with a special alertness, because the story has a claim on them and they on it.”
You might wonder, then, what exactly the purpose of theology is. Is it meant to bring more souls into the fold? Is it intended simply to entertain, to provide an intellectual exercise, for those who already believe? More generously you could argue that, for those who possess faith, theology is meant to deepen it. I suspect Robinson would agree with this statement. But if theology cannot create faith, then it can mean nothing to individuals without faith, save perhaps as an object of academic study—a dead, mute thing. The problem for those who want to believe, then, is how to get into a closed system. This strikes me as one way of describing the nature of Calvinistic grace, of unconditional election.
The theological problem at the heart of the Gilead quartet is that of incommunicability. Jack is well-versed in scripture, can be said to know his Bible inside and out. But it does not speak to him. He is, as we’re shown time and time again, utterly incapable of feeling the truth of God’s message, of experiencing its urgent reality. “It is possible to know the great truths without feeling the truth of them,” Jack observes in Home. “That’s where the problem lies. In my case.” It isn’t the case, in the world of Robinson’s novels, that true religious feeling can’t be acquired—Lila would seem to be the relevant case study here—only that for some specific people it can’t be acquired. These individuals, Jack among them, are locked out of the experience of faith. Precisely this is what it means, in Calvinistic terms, to be damned, to have been passed over by the spirit of predestination.
To write a novel about incommunicability isn’t impossible, but it has posed a serious problem for Robinson. One suspects it’s because she hasn’t managed to formulate the problem properly to herself. “Her version of Calvinism is a humane anti-humanism,” as James Wood observes in his review of Reading Genesis. “We are autonomous moral agents, but everything we do is providentially planned. We are exalted beings, but utterly debased at the same time.” It seems to me that any fictional project founded on a worldview like this will have a tendency to cancel itself out, to deal occasionally in extreme and opposite terms, and at other times in middle-of-the-road, meliorist tropes. There’s little room for the messiness of human life, for real moral conundrums, to crop up—when and if they do, they are dealt with half-heartedly.
For me, this seems the key to the mawkishness of Robinson’s fiction, its basically halcyon depiction of small-town life in mid-century America. The darkness is always on the edge of town, just as Jack is always oddly peripheral to the novels that make up the Gilead quartet. And in fact there’s a strange ongoingness to Robinson’s fictional project—adding new novels to the cycle and worrying over the same material from different perspectives—that suggests an urgency in communicating Jack’s damnedness. It must be replayed, over and over again. It is a closed off world, redolent of the existential hell of Sartre’s No Exit. It’s as though Robinson were playing out her guilt, her inability to conceive of a character like Jack as necessarily doomed; she is struggling, though not hard enough, with the strictures of her particular faith.
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The office of the American presidency is so constituted as to require its holders to routinely commit acts of profound evil. That a sincerely religious individual ascribing to the ethical mores of Christianity could, in good conscience, fraternize with an American president is not by any means surprising. But it should be shocking. Consequently, Robinson’s long romance with Barack Obama has been odd—not to mention a touch embarrassing—to watch unfold. The sheer volume of pablum the two are capable of producing when shunted together on stage would fell a stout toddler, while to the adult auditor it can feel like the sonic equivalent of a wet willy, if in lieu of spit the perpetrating finger had been dunked in warm applesauce. Robinson’s relationship with Obama has always been disagreeably fulsome. Writing in The Nation in December of 2016, when the Obama years and all they signified of a new, compassionate neoliberalism had come to a fender-crunching halt, Robinson delivered an uncomfortably hagiographic treatment of the soon-to-be ex-president. “My respect for Barack Obama,” she proclaimed, “is vast and unshadowed.”
What’s immediately striking about the article—aside from Robinson’s strange fetishization of Obama’s biracialism—is the fact that it is, in essence, a paean to passivity. Obama’s grace, poise, and forbearance in the face of extreme oppositional mauvaise foi are exalted. And while it would be unfair to argue that as the nation’s first Black president Obama wasn’t under enormous pressure to perform some version of the civil sublime every day of his presidency—he was, and for the most part, he did—it’s disappointing that Robinson seems to view this as his signal achievement. What’s more, Robinson evinces a startling inability to accept that a Christian virtue might not be a political virtue—that it might, indeed, be a political hindrance. Oddly, the essay ends up intimating that Obama might have been an ineffectual president precisely because of his Christianity.
Robinson’s theology doesn’t necessarily endorse passivity when it comes to real-world suffering. But it would seem to me she forgives too much. As Robinson is well aware, the Hebrew Bible makes very few judgments of its characters. “There is, in the view of the Hebrew writers, something elusive, unpredictable, unresolvable about human nature,” as Robert Alter writes in The Literary Guide to the Bible. “Man, made in God’s image, shares a measure of God’s transcendence of categories, images, defining labels.” The non-judgmental character of Biblical narrative “opens up vistas of ambiguity…in our perception of the characters.” In her aged wisdom, Robinson seems to have learned from and adopted this nearly preternatural open-mindedness. But there are some matters in which kowtowing to ambiguity constitutes a grave moral failing. In that same article for The Nation, Robinson gives Obama a pass for his liberal use of drone strikes, which by some counts killed more than one-hundred civilians. Robinson, ever one to speak up for the voiceless—in this case, the recently defrocked leader of the free world—upbraids Obama’s critics for “never proposing better options than these painful choices, which, by comparison with others on offer, clearly spare lives.”
It’s a faultlessly diplomatic point—an appeal to nuance, where one might have hoped for an appeal to a higher power. In America, we have a natural fear of zealotry; after all, the religious right has been tallying up victories for the past fifty years, and it doesn’t seem like they’ll stop, or be stopped, anytime soon. Naturally, we’ve lost sight of what a progressive zealotry might look like. Robinson, as a religious student of American abolitionism, is better positioned than most to grasp the fervor that led lesser-known figures like William Lloyd Garrison to move so aggressively against their time. I’ve often wondered what it would mean for a figure like Robinson, with all her moral authority—not to mention the ear of a former president—to be, simply, uncompromising. What would happen if she argued furiously that to accidentally kill a civilian with a drone strike is murder, plain and simple? That to kill anyone, save in the most desperate and immediate self-defense, is murder? It wouldn’t be a practical argument. But it would be the argument of someone who truly believes that every human being was created by God.
For a while it was possible to assume that Robinson’s worship of Obama was a discrete phenomenon. But paying lip service, even of the most transparent sort, to democratic and humanistic ideals seems to be all it takes, these days, to win her unflagging loyalty. In a recent interview with The New York Times, titled “Marilynne Robinson Considers Biden a Gift of God,” Robinson doubled down on her bleakly complacent liberalism. “Frankly, I’m less than a year younger than Joe Biden, so I believe utterly in his competence, his brilliance, his worldview,” she explains. “I really do.” Elsewhere in the interview she rehashes some of her theological hobby horses. “My theological question is how to reconcile the cruelty of the world with the idea of God’s omnipotence,” she observes at one point, “and I simply assume that’s something I will not understand in this life.” Biden, brainlessness be damned, has continued to offer full-throated support for an Israeli state increasingly beholden to right-wing, ethno-nationalist factions. (Since then, Robinson has briefly touched on the war in Gaza in an article for The New York Review of Books, “Agreeing to Our Harm.” Her evenhanded remarks, it should go without saying, are as nuanced as they are feeble.)
Among the serious reviews of Reading Genesis, I could only find one that cottoned on to this hypocrisy. In Bookforum, Michael Robbins noted that Robinson’s praise of Biden is discomfiting, given that the president “is currently arming the Israeli military that has killed over 12,000 Palestinian children since last October.” That number, in the meantime, has risen to 15,000. The Bible has a word for this, too. That word is Gehenna—the sacrificial site, the infernal valley. Whether Joe Biden knows the word, and whether he’s possessed of the wherewithal to explain the horrors it connotes, I can’t say. But Robinson does, and would. That she has nothing of consequence to say about this genocide seems more and more an indictment of her moral imagination. “Her prose is beautiful, her imagination appalls me,” Robinson once observed of Flannery O’Connor. “There’s a lot of writing about religion with a cold eye, but virtually none with a loving heart.” Reading Reading Genesis, you begin to wish Robinson would subject her own religion to the chilly austerities of deep thought.
Bailey Trela
Bailey Trela is a writer living in New York whose writing has appeared in Commonweal, The Baffler, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. He is a contributing writer at Cleveland Review of Books.