Why Marilynne?
2 in a series
The immediate cause of my joint Marilynne Robinson-Annie Dillard reread is probably pretty obvious: Marilynne Robinson just turned 80 and has a new book about to drop. That book is called Reading Genesis, and is the outcome of her long engagement with the first book of the Hebrew Bible. (I’ll be reviewing it for the Bulwark because they were the first to ask.) When a famous writer, at a point when (unfortunately) we have to assume is at least a little past the middle of her career (though I hope to God she’s churning ‘em out at 105), turns to the incipit of monotheism as we know it, you feel like it’s not an unnatural moment to read her from the beginning too. And I’ve been publicly quasi-obsessed with her for a long time.
My claims for Robinson are big, and I’ve made them frequently. If there’s a better living writer in the English language, I don’t know who that person is. (The rest of my top-ten, if anyone’s interested: Samuel Delany, Dillard, Louise Erdrich, Edward P. Jones, Suzan-Lori Parks, John McPhee, Percival Everett, Lydia Davis, Diane Williams, and, as of The Fraud, Zadie Smith. Helen Oyeyemi is just outside the top-ten; not too far outside it are at least three friends of the newsletter: Adam Roberts, Francis Spufford, and B.D. McClay. Our best filmmaker is David Lynch and it isn’t close. Our best comic-book writers are the Hernandez brothers, but it is close because Alan Moore is still alive. You can see that I like lists.) Another of Robinson’s fans once put it this way: I believe that her writings have changed me, fundamentally, for the better.
If you want to see some particularly abject hero-worship, you can read some of my old writeups of articles of hers that aren’t or (at the time) weren’t collected in books, and of articles about her, at The Gilead Society, an annotated MR bibliography that my friend Christian started and pretty much runs these days. Back then I would also write up the occasional bit of mean press she’d get, and say downright unparliamentary things about anyone who criticized her. Though I continue to love her work deeply, I’m a little more critical than I used to be — hopefully enough so to add a little thunder and lightning to these proceedings.
Why might I be more critical? Well, let’s look at the origin of my quotation above, about Marilynne Robinson fundamentally changing her readers for the better.