by Paul Elie
from Georgetown University

Marilynne Robinson’s Method: Compassion, Gentleness

Saturday afternoon a first edition of Marilynne Robinson’s novel Lila arrived in the mail, an early holiday gift from a friend who understands what literature is about.

I owe Commonweal a review of the novel, which I read over the summer, but I find myself stymied: What more is there to say about the novel, which has gotten so much attention, or about the trilogy, begun with Gilead and carried forward with Home, that now may be extended further with novels focused on two of the younger characters, John Ames Boughton and John Boughton Ames?

There’s this: as much as Lila joins its two immediate predecessors, it joins Robinson’s first novel, Housekeeping, for the new book is the story of a woman who finds herself in circumstances she couldn’t have foreseen, as was the case for Housekeeping’s women Ruth, Lucille, and Sylvie – and a woman who finds, in the circumstances, a tenderness she couldn’t have foreseen, either.

Tuesday evening PEN will auction first editions of books by 75 known authors, each inscribed well after publication with the author’s further insights – “second thoughts.”  Robinson inscribed Housekeeping thus: “I chose the name Ruth [for the novel’s narrator] because it means compassion, gentleness. It was a statement to myself about the method of the narrative.” In a Times Magazine feature about the auction, she elaborated:

… it was true then, as it is now, that I have to feel that I am being fair to my characters at the very least – not giving them faults or limitations that would make them my helpless victims, the easy objects of my praise or blame. I decided that compassion as a discipline would preclude this, and would give them both dimension and a certain latitude, in the sense that I would be giving them real options. Writers always say characters surprise their authors, and I thought that would be likelier to happen if I had not judged them at the outset and would not judge them at any point in the story. Ruth to me meant mercy and graciousness.

Lila of Lila, like Ruth of Housekeeping, is neither judge nor judged, and that quality of equanimity, as much as the novel’s religious roots or its heartland textures, is the source of the Iowa trilogy’s power.  Robinson has done what Tolstoy, in the famous opening to Anna Karenina, suggested can’t be done: she has written great fiction about goodness.

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.