I’ve seen Marilynne Robinson’s novels in bookstores before, but the covers never stood out to me (unfair? yes.) But I came across an excerpt from one of her essays — having no idea she wrote such things — and was impressed enough to put The Death of Adam on hold at the library. I haven’t been dissapointed.

All the essays are, as she states in her introduction, “contrarian in method and spirit.”¹ In other words, they are polemics. This is important to remember, since they will seem hyperbolic if considered otherwise. She is similar in style and temperament to Joan Didion: sober almost to melancholy, but not quite.

The introduction immerses the reader in Robinson’s way of understanding and discussing things. Her views are contrarian, not because she has firmly taken sides in any existing conflict, but because “contemporary discourse feels to [her] empty and false.”² This leads her to attack diverse aspects of American culture, with the overarching goal of saving it from itself.

I want to overhear passionate arguments about what we are and what we are doing and what we ought to do. I want to feel that art is an utterance made in good faith by one human being to another. I want to believe that there are geniuses scheming to astonish the rest of us, just for the pleasure of it. I miss civilization, and I want it back.³

Robinson has been strongly influenced by John Calvin, the Puritans and protestant theology, and this informs everything she writes. It is especially important to her critique of American culture, which centers on its neglect of history and its formative traditions.

In several of the essays in this book I talk about John Calvin, a figure of the greatest historical consequence, especially for our culture, who is more or less entirely unread. Learned-looking books on subjects to which he is entirely germane typically do not include a single work of his immense corpus in their bibliographies, nor indicate in their allusions to him a better knowledge than folklore can provide of what he thought and said. I have encountered an odd sort of social pressure as often as I have read him. One does not read Calvin. One does not think of reading him. The prohibition is as absolute as it ever was against Marx, who always had the glamour of the subversive or the forbidden about him. Calvin seems to be neglected on principle. This is interesting. It is such a good example of the oddness of our approach to history, and to knowledge more generally, that it bears looking into. Everything always bears looking into, astonishing as that fact is.⁴

It’s worth noting that the essays in the book were all published in the 1990s. It’s amazing to see how little has changed, the essays aren’t dated or immaterial to America’s present state. They certainly deserve thorough, attentive reading, both for their content and style.

1. p.1 [↩]
2. p.2 [↩]
3. p.4 [↩]
4. p.12 [↩]