"A Sense of History"

The previous twenty-five posts in this series have covered Marilynne Robinson’s and Annie Dillard’s youth (I, II), some of their first influences (I, II, III, IV), their earliest available work (I, II, III, IV, V, VI), their grad-school theses and dissertations, their first published books for general audiences, and a random uncollected but representative Dillard essay. We’re up to the mid-1980s.

“Language Is Smarter Than We Are” was not Robinson’s first piece for the NYT. In December 1985, she brutally pans Caroline Blackwood’s On the Perimeter — “perfectly dreadful considered as prose and as journalism.” In May 1986, she hedges on Ingeborg Lauterstein’s Vienna Girl (“Am I, by the way, alone in the view that psychic dwarfs are slightly overrepresented in contemporary letters?”) In October 1986, she praises Peter Taylor’s novel A Summons to Memphis. As she does so, she manages to describe pretty precisely what always bothered me a little bit in Faulkner, Percy, and other canonical Southern writers, and in the way we talk about them. She likes Taylor as much as she does in part because he doesn’t do this: