Where to Start with Marilynne Robinson: A Reading Guide

Marilynne Robinson (born 1943) is the most celebrated serious American novelist of her generation — a writer whose four novels (published over nearly forty years) have established her as the heir to Hawthorne, Thoreau, and the great tradition of American literary Protestantism. Her prose is among the most beautiful being written in English: deeply rhythmical, attentive to the ordinary as a site of grace, and organised around the conviction that human life has a significance that transcends its apparent smallness. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Gilead in 2005; Barack Obama cited her as one of his favourite living novelists.

Where to Start: Gilead (2004)

The essential Robinson — and one of the most beautiful American novels of the past fifty years. John Ames, a 76-year-old minister in Gilead, Iowa, is dying. He writes a letter to his seven-year-old son — born late in his life to a young second wife — to give the boy something of his father to carry. The letter becomes a meditation on theology, grace, the nature of blessing, and the specific history of Gilead and its families. The arrival of Jack Boughton — the prodigal son of Ames’s oldest friend, who represents everything Ames cannot quite forgive — provides the novel’s dramatic tension.

The prose is extraordinary: Robinson writes individual sentences that stop readers cold with their accuracy and their beauty. The novel demands slow reading, attending to each sentence individually; it rewards that reading with an account of how an ordinary life in a small town can be, in the deepest sense, meaningful.

Housekeeping (1980)

Robinson’s debut — and in some ways her most formally distinctive novel. Ruth and Lucille, orphaned after their mother drives a car into the glacial lake at the edge of their Idaho town, are raised by a series of female relatives and finally by their aunt Sylvie, a transient who sleeps with her shoes on and lets leaves drift into the house. As the girls grow, Lucille moves toward conventionality and belonging; Ruth follows Sylvie toward a different kind of existence — untethered, vagrant, outside the social arrangements that give most lives their shape. The novel is Gothic in its imagery, lyrical in its prose, and profoundly original in its account of what it might mean to choose transience over settlement.

Lila (2014)

The third Gilead novel — and the one that gives the voice to Lila, John Ames’s young wife, whose inner life is sketched in Gilead but whose story is told only here. Lila was abandoned as a child and rescued by a drifter named Doll; she spent her childhood and young womanhood moving across Depression-era America as a transient laborer, learning that no place is permanent and no relationship can be trusted. Her arrival in Gilead and her gradual opening to the possibility of a permanent life — of being loved and staying — is the novel’s subject. Robinson renders Lila’s psychology from inside with great precision and great care.

Reading Marilynne Robinson

Robinson is the novelist of grace — of the presence of the sacred in ordinary life, of the significance of individual human existence in a universe that could seem to render it trivial. Her fiction is not evangelical or doctrinal; it is Protestant in the deepest sense, concerned with the individual conscience’s direct encounter with what matters. Begin with Gilead: it is the most fully realised and the most immediately accessible of her three novels. Read Housekeeping for her most formally original work. Read Lila to complete the story of the characters Gilead introduces. All three reward slow, attentive reading; all three are among the finest American novels of their decade.