by Paul Elie
from Georgetown University

Marilynne Robinson: A Question Answered

John Calvin wrote somewhere that for the human person every encounter with another person presents each of them with a question to be answered.

That (or words to that effect) is what Marilynne Robinson said from the stage at the 92nd Street Y in New York last night, where she read from her new novel, Lila, and joined in a conversation with Colm Tóibín, who read from his new novel, Nora Webster.  I introduced the two authors and moderated the conversation.

Every encounter presents a question to be answered.  Well, if that is true, then that – I proposed during the conversation – is why Rev. John Ames, narrator and protagonist of Robinson’s novel Gilead, sometimes cogitates for half a day before paying a visit to his friend and neighbor Rev. Robert Boughton, even though the two of them have been best friends in rural Iowa for more than sixty years.

And that is why I paused to think long and hard before posing questions to Robinson and Tóibín.

At its best moments the onstage conversation was a full-on conversation – free and open to the unexpected.  The takeaway (so the producer, Bernard Schwartz, told me afterward): The character of Rev. Boughton in Gilead is based squarely on a man the author watched from long range during her girlhood.  A Judge Boughton was a acquaintance of her grandfather’s.  He wore a toupée, and he went about accompanied by a poodle whose fur was the color of his toupee.  Both of them – the judge, and the poodle – had once been tall but were tall no longer, and they were quite a sight out in town, the two of them bent over and matching up top.

Here’s the question I wish I’d asked onstage: Why is it that poodle didn’t make it into Gilead along with Boughton?  And what happened to Boughton’s toupée?

The photograph is by the Y’s longtime photographer for literary events, Nancy Crampton, who surely has taken more photographs of writers than any other photographer alive.  

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