As many TOJ readers know, this October saw the release of Marilynne Robinson’s latest novel, Lila. This was cause for great rejoicing among her many fans and a chance for those who can’t see the genius of her work to point that out again. As an unapologetic fan I’ve already finished the novel and was struck by her ability to show raptures of the holy in the present as well as to draw us into the world of Gilead. Of course, wanting more after I finished the novel I went in search of reviews and profiles that I thought I would share here.
The New York Times published an amazing profile on Robinson that reviews not just the novel but wonderfully situates the novelist in her life and in the place she calls home:
“Grace was not said growing up,” she said. “I was brought up in a household where I was aware of having a certain kind of identity, which was Presbyterian. The word by itself is very powerful. There was an implicit ethic that I felt. If anybody had asked if I had a religious upbringing, I would have said yes, and yet any sense of having any experience with religious experience was, until college, random and approximate. It’s a funny thing. I like to be truthful. I did not have an especially religious upbringing, and yet I feel like I’m being disloyal to my mother when I say that.”
Fare Forward has offered two different takes on the book. The first, by TOJ friend Peter Blair, focuses on some of the shortcomings he found in the book:
Ames. He’s a wonderful character who seems to embody a great personal holiness. But sometimes you wonder how he is a preacher. One of the funniest tropes in Lila to me is his repeated apologies to Lila for his inability to adequately answer her questions about suffering, hell, and grace, which are constantly on her mind (“For a preacher you ain’t much at explaining things,” Lila says at one point). There are a few times he attempts an answer to her questions, but often he acts kind of surprised by them (“Lila, you always do ask the hardest questions”) and then retreats into an invocation of mystery or the transcendence of divine truth (“If I tried to explain I wouldn’t believe what I was saying to you. That’s lying, isn’t it?…I really don’t think preachers ought to lie”). It turns out to be so difficult to put theology into words without sullying it that it is better just to remain silent. But what, then, does he preach when he steps up to the pulpit?
The second offered by Charles Clark responds to Blair by pointing out the spiritual lens that can appear in Robinson’s novels:
At times, it seems Robinson is reaching beyond even the author’s usual omniscience to exercise a synthetic spiritual insight, a fictional apokalypsis in imitation of God’s own perspective on the minds and hearts of mankind, filtered through a lens of grace that rarifies and even glorifies the human person.
Another friend of TOJ, Books and Culture editor John Wilson, reviewed the book for Chicago Tribune, urging those who weren’t won over by her previous works to read Lila:
My message is simple. Even if you haven’t found the two previous books to your taste, give “Lila” a try. Perhaps you’ll be won over, as I was, by the very first sentence: “The child was just there on the stoop in the dark, hugging herself against the cold, all cried out and nearly sleeping.” The child is Lila, whose perception of the world becomes ours for the course of the book. In the present time of the story, she’s grown up, but the narrative often shifts to earlier days. She has a protector of sorts, a woman named Doll, who takes her away from a feckless, brutal household for a life on the road, on the edge
And this week Robinson herself published an essay on lessons learned from Jonathan Edwards:
When I was in college, and even earlier because my older brother introduced me to Modern Thought as he was introduced to it, I felt gloomily captive to the determinisms of Positivism, Behaviorism, Freudianism, Marxism, and the rest. I was troubled by all this for years. Then I was assigned by a philosophy professor to read Jonathan Edwards’s treatise The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended, Part Four, Chapter III. I found in it a glorious footnote on moonlight, and was liberated.