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Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition

Marilynne Robinson

by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Other literary forms

Although Marilynne Robinson’s novels have been her most acclaimed works, her critical essays on topics ranging from environmental disaster to religion have been praised as valuable contributions to life and letters in the United States. Her book The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998) explores the contours of modern culture as its ideas have been shaped by thinkers as diverse as John Calvin, Charles Darwin, and Sigmund Freud. In an earlier book, Mother Country (1989), Robinson examines the significant physical and environmental damage caused by Sellafield, a nuclear reprocessing plant in Britain. In addition to writing fiction, Robinson frequently contributes essays and reviews to such periodicals as The Paris Review, Harper’s, and The New York Times Book Review.

Marilynne Robinson.

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(AP/Wide World Photos)

Achievements

Many critics have called Marilynne Robinson a “writer’s writer” for her elegant and hauntingly evocative use of language and for the spiritual force of her stories. Her first novel, Housekeeping, appeared to great critical acclaim in 1980, and writers from Walker Percy to Mary Gordon and Doris Lessing praised it for its richness and variety of tone, its delightful sentences, and its haunting dream of a story. Housekeeping was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and it won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for best first novel for 1980 as well as the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

Although Robinson produced two books of nonfiction between her first and second novels, twenty-four years passed before she turned her pen to fiction again. In 1989, Mother Country, Robinson’s nonfiction examination of the consequences of pollution at the British nuclear reprocessing plant Sellafield, was a finalist for the National Book Award. When Gilead appeared in 2004, Robinson’s loyal cadre of readers gladly welcomed her return. Critics once again heaped praise on Robinson’s writing, and the novel won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for fiction as well as the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. In 2008, her third novel, Home, was named a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.

Biography

The younger of two children, Marilynne Robinson was born on November 26, 1943, in Sandpoint, Idaho. As a child, Robinson moved around quite a bit in the northwestern United States, living in the towns of Sagle, Sandpoint, and Coolin and several smaller towns. In 1962, she graduated from Coeur d’Alene High School and then entered Pembroke College, the former women’s college at Brown University, where she joined her brother, who was already a senior. Her college studies in religion and creative writing prepared the ground for her later novels, for religion plays a key role in all three of her novels.

After she graduated from Brown, Robinson taught for a year in France at the Université de Haute-Bretagne before returning to the United States to pursue graduate work in English at the University of Washington. She completed her Ph.D. with a dissertation on William Shakespeare in 1977, but she began writing her first novel, Housekeeping, while she was working on her dissertation. During graduate school she also married and began to raise a family. In 1989, she and her husband separated, leaving Robinson to raise her children alone.

Housekeeping was published to great acclaim in 1980, winning major awards and becoming an American classic almost instantly, yet twenty-four years passed before Robinson published her next novel, Gilead. During the years between novels, Robinson continued to write, producing two nonfiction books, Mother Country and The Death of Adam. During these years she also started teaching. Robinson has been a visiting professor at numerous universities, including the University of Kent and Amherst, and she has also taught in the University of Massachusetts M.F.A. Program for Poets and Writers and the New York State Writers’ Program at Skidmore College. In 1991, Robinson became a member of the faculty at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop.

Analysis

Like Willa Cather, Sarah Orne Jewett, and other novelists of the Midwest before her, Marilynne Robinson elegantly draws evocative settings in which her characters must cope with the loneliness and the isolation of their settings. Although her first novel, Housekeeping, is set in a little town in the Northwest, the two young girls at the novel’s center must discover strategies either to embrace the forbidding loneliness of the glacial plain on which they live or to reject its haunting isolation and the ghostly memories that inhabit the town. Robinson effectively re-creates the social and physical challenges that life in often inhospitable environments can bring. Although her novels rarely focus on community, they do explore the ways in which individuals must navigate the rough waters of their lives in the larger world.

Many critics have called Robinson a feminist writer and have often spoken of her in the same breath with Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood, among others. While Robinson’s novels certainly feature lyrical prose, as do the works of these other writers, only Housekeeping focuses on women and their role in society. That novel does ask questions about the nature of women and what it might be like to live in a society populated exclusively by women. The only men in the novel are either deceased or ineffectual, and the two young girls and the aunt with whom they live must decide how they want to define themselves as women. Do they define themselves in the light of men, dressing for them and becoming a part of their society, or do they define themselves by their tasks—“housekeeping,” for example—and construct their own society apart from the world around them? Can they define themselves simply by the ways in which they construct their own community of women and the codes they enact to provide structure to that community? In the novels published since Housekeeping, however, Robinson has focused specifically on the lives of men who must come to terms with their harsh environments as well as their spiritual roles in their communities, in their families, and in their own lives.

Above all, Robinson’s novels meditate on religious questions, and they are imbued with an almost mystical quality in which even the bleakest landscape or most mundane social situation is shot through with rays of transcendence and spirituality. Both Gilead and Home deal explicitly with a family of preachers and their attempts to understand their calling and the power of grace and mercy. Although Housekeeping does not feature religion in the same explicit fashion, it nevertheless raises questions about incarnation, revelation, grace, the nature of faith, and mystery.

Housekeeping

After their mother dies by driving her car off a cliff into a lake, Ruth and Lucille, the two young sisters at the center of Housekeeping, grow up in the family house under the guidance of a variety of women. Set in the small Far West town of Fingerbone, the novel revolves around these two young girls’ coming-of-age in a town where everyone knows everyone else’s business and where the glacial lake that borders the town has swallowed up both their grandfather and their mother.

After their mother dies, the girls first live in the family house with their grandmother, Mrs. Sylvia Foster. When she dies, two bumbling great-aunts, Lily and Nona Foster, take over responsibility for the girls. Since these women are never sure what to do with the children and never sure how to respond to their questions or their behavior, they soon flee, but not before they ask the girls’ aunt, Sylvie Fisher, if she can come live with the girls. While Lily and Nona debate whether or not Sylvie, the prodigal daughter of Sylvia Foster, who has run away to get married and never looked back, will even show up, Ruth and Lucille try to take care of themselves and explore the town and the woods surrounding it. Sylvie Fisher does indeed show up one day, and Lily and Nona gladly flee from their child-rearing tasks.

The girls soon discover that Sylvie is an eccentric who lives by her own rules and in her own time. When the house floods, she simply moves the family to the second floor, visiting the first floor sometimes to grab a piece of coal for the stove. Although Sylvie appears to be committed to staying with the girls, the two sisters are constantly afraid that she will leave silently one night, never to return. Sylvie’s odd behavior begins to drive a wedge between Ruth and Lucille, who had once been close-knit as they tried to navigate the choppy channels of a world full of loss. Eventually, through a number of incidents, Lucille decides to leave home and to live with one of her schoolteachers. She makes some new friends, goes shopping for clothes, and begins to fit in with her classmates at school. Ruth, on the other hand, becomes more and more like Sylvie. One night, the two of them row out onto the lake and spend the night there. The next morning they hop a freight train back into town. When the local sheriff appears at the door later that morning to try to remove Ruth from Sylvie’s custody, Ruth decides in that moment that she prefers a life of transience with her aunt Sylvie to a settled life in Fingerbone. The novel’s dramatic ending follows them to their own ends as they burn down the family house and vanish into the woods.

Several themes emerge in Housekeeping that appear in Robinson’s later fiction as well. The novel emphasizes the nature of place. Fingerbone, a haunting skeletal name that symbolizes death as well as a pointer of new directions, is physically isolated, and its isolation is made even harsher by the periodic flooding of the glacial lake. This small town is not only the ancestral home where Ruth’s and Lucille’s identities are shaped by their family natures but also the place where they can choose to remain rooted or from which they can pull up their roots. In some ways, living in Fingerbone is destiny, for the town itself shapes the girls and their decisions.

Housekeeping also deals with the idea of grace. Eccentric as she is, Sylvie Fisher loves Ruth and Lucille as deeply as she might love her own children. She understands that love means allowing individuals freedom to find their own ways, to succeed or to fail in the choices they make. Although she expresses her love and grace in her own peculiar way, she provides the girls the freedom they need to decide for themselves which directions they will choose. The novel also deals with loss and survival, illustrating through Ruth’s and Lucille’s choices the ways in which individuals cope with loss.

The names of the characters in the novel are also symbolic. The Fosters, of course, are a foster family for the girls, enabling them and fostering a certain kind of attitude toward life. Sylvie Fisher operates differently. Like Jesus, she is a fisher of people who tries to get the girls to follow her and, like her, to develop their own strategies for coping with loss. She refuses to give them pat answers, preferring instead to let Ruth and Lucille do a bit of their own fishing for answers. Like her biblical counterpart, Ruth goes off into a strange country with her kinswoman in search of a new life. Finally, the opening of Housekeeping, in which the narrator proclaims that her name is Ruth, echoes that of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), which begins, “Call me Ishmael.” With such an opening, readers know quickly that they will soon find themselves on a journey with a character in search of herself.

Gilead

Twenty-four years after the publication of Housekeeping, Robinson published a very different kind of novel in Gilead. The evocative and haunting prose of this work hones in on one central character and his struggles to come to terms with his past, his present, and his future. Set in the small midwestern town of Gilead, Iowa, the novel takes the form of a letter written in 1956 by seventy-seven-year-old pastor John Ames, who is seriously ill with angina and who feels death approaching, to his seven-year-old son. The letter provides a chronicle of the Ames family history as well as a theological meditation on living a life focused on forgiveness and grace.

Ames comes from a long line of preachers. In the story he relates, his grandfather, living in Maine in the mid-nineteenth century, has a vision of Christ in chains that drives him to move west to Kansas to preach against slavery. He eventually becomes a chaplain in the American Civil War and loses his right eye in battle, but he believes that his struggle in the war will help lead to freedom for the slaves. Ames’s preacher father, an ardent pacifist, clashes often with his own father, the Civil War chaplain. Ames himself marries young, but his first wife dies in childbirth. For the next forty years, Ames lives in solitude, preaching on mundane topics such as baptism and confirmation. At sixty-seven, Ames remarries; his second wife is thirty years younger than he, and the young son to whom Ames is writing is their child.

Ames estimates that during his pastorate he must have preached enough sermons to fill 255 volumes. His most enduring sermon is one on World War I and the great influenza epidemic of the same time. In that sermon, he observes that the young men dying of influenza are escaping a far worse fate. He never preaches it, however, because he thinks that the only people it might reach are those opposed to the war already. During his forty years of solitude, his best friend, the Reverend Robert Boughton, has a son and names him John Ames Boughton. The boy, known as Jack, brings Ames little joy, however, for he is forever playing hurtful pranks on Ames. In his long letter to his own young son, however, Ames says that people can change, so we must be prepared to forgive them.

Gilead offers an extended theological meditation on the nature of forgiveness and the nature of grace. In the Bible, Gilead is a mountainous territory whose trees produce a soothing balm that the prophet Jeremiah compares to the healing power of God. In his letter to his young son, Ames offers his own balm as he strives to forgive young Jack Boughton for his prodigal and hurtful ways. The balm is meant not only for Jack but also for Ames and his son. Ames adopts Jack as his spiritual son and works to overcome any resentment he feels toward Jack for his profligate ways.

Much as she does in Housekeeping, in Gilead Robinson chronicles the struggles between children and their parents or their elders. In this case, Ames must come to terms with the conflicts between his father and grandfather as well as those between himself and Jack. By the end of the novel, Ames has accepted his coming death, and, in a breathtaking moment toward the end of the book, he graciously blesses Jack while the two are sitting on a bus-stop bench in the city.

Home

In the sequel to Gilead, Robinson once again takes up questions of grace and forgiveness, redemption and hope. Home also involves two men who are struggling to reconcile themselves to each other. In Home, John Ames’s closest friend, the Reverend Robert Boughton, is dying. His daughter Glory, the youngest of his eight children, has returned to Gilead to take care of her dying father. Soon, her prodigal brother, Jack, the spiritual son of John Ames, returns to Gilead as well. A miscreant, an alcoholic who has spent time in jail for various crimes, Jack is at once the black sheep of the family and Robert Boughton’s most beloved child.

After being gone for twenty years, Jack arrives in Gilead seeking to be reconciled with his father; he forms a strong bond with his sister, Glory, and he seeks forgiveness and mercy from John Ames as he painfully confesses his old misdeeds and the ways he has hurt Ames. The novel follows the Boughton family members day by day as they try to overcome past failures and shortcomings and to come to terms with the reality of Robert’s dying and their attempts to bond anew as a family. Glory patiently endures the barbs that her father and her brother throw at each other as they try to forge a new bond of love. Toward the end of the novel, Jack’s son meanders into the house and his mother, Della, declares that her son thinks he wants to be a preacher. As the novel draws to a close, Glory reflects that she has been waiting a lifetime for this moment and declares that God works in mysterious and wonderful ways.

Home is a retelling of the prodigal son story from the New Testament. Robinson’s story differs a little in that the older son is the prodigal while the younger child is the one who remains stable and close to home. In the Bible story (Luke 15:11-32), the younger son is the prodigal and the older feels betrayed by the father’s love for the prodigal. Robinson demonstrates the great anguish that accompanies homecomings, especially in cases involving a coming death. The strongest themes here are redemption and reconciliation. No matter what misdeeds Jack has committed in the past, his father and his sister love him enough to be reconciled to him. He can be redeemed from his past life and start anew with those he has wronged because in their gracious love for him they open their arms wide and welcome him back into their family. As Glory declares at the end of the novel, the Lord is merciful and loving, and the future of this family opens into that love and mercy as Jack’s son enters the ministry. In Home, Robinson once again shows the ways in which the mysteries of God enter the mundane and ordinary world of men and women.

Bibliography

1 

Burke, William. “Border Crossings in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Modern Fiction Studies 37, no. 4 (Winter, 1991): 716-725. Explores the dramatic tension that arises from the manner in which various characters in Robinson’s novel define themselves either by their rootedness to place or by their rootlessness.

2 

Carver, Christine. “Nothing Left to Love: Housekeeping and Strange Freedoms.” American Literature 68 (March, 1996): 111-137. Focuses on Robinson’s treatment of the exhilarating yet mournful freedom that comes with loss.

3 

Gernes, Sonia. “Transcendent Women: Uses of the Mystical in Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Religion and Literature 23 (1991): 143-165. Examines images of transcendence in the two novels, with particular focus on the ways in which the women in Robinson’s novel forge spiritual bonds with one another and the world around them.

4 

Greiner, Donald. “Revising the Paradigm: Female Bonding and the Transients of Housekeeping.” In Women Without Men: Female Bonding and the American Novel of the 1980’s. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993. Discusses how the main characters in Housekeeping devise ways of coping with loss and alienation.

5 

Hubbard, Stacy Carson. “The Balm in Gilead.” Michigan Quarterly Review 44, no. 3 (Summer, 2005): 541-544. Provides discussion of Robinson’s novel Gilead, with an emphasis on the comfort and mercy that the protagonist, John Ames, offers his antagonist, Jack Boughton.

6 

Leah, Gordon. “’A Person Can Change’: Grace, Forgiveness, and Sonship in Marilynne Robinson’s Novel Gilead.” Evangelical Quarterly 80, no. 1 (2008): 53-58. Examination of Gilead focuses on the novel’s central themes of forgiveness and mercy.

7 

Robinson, Marilynne. “At Home with Marilynne Robinson.” Interview by Claire Kirch. Publishers Weekly, July 14, 2008. Robinson discusses her novel Home, her writing habits, and her life of teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Carrigan, Henry L. "Marilynne Robinson." Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition, edited by Carl Rollyson, Salem Press, 2010. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=CSLF_15250141000080.
APA 7th
Carrigan, H. L. (2010). Marilynne Robinson. In C. Rollyson (Ed.), Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Carrigan, Henry L. "Marilynne Robinson." Edited by Carl Rollyson. Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2010. Accessed September 17, 2025. online.salempress.com.