In a wonderful scene early in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead, young children baptize a litter of feral cats by a river’s edge. The key to Robinson’s luminosity, though, lies less in her prose style than in her religious vision, and in the remarkable similarities between good religion and good fiction. With his turn to Robinson for help explaining grace, the president proved himself a more probing reader than many of her reviewers, who use words like “luminous” and “revelatory” to describe Robinson’s novels, but only in the sense that she is a beautiful writer. Robinson’s words had a special role to play in the president’s powerful speech, since he used them to link the black church’s long struggle with white racist violence to a concept of grace as the experience of love in the midst of terror and sorrow. That, more than any particular policy or analysis, is what’s called upon right now, I think-what a friend of mine, the writer Marilynne Robinson, calls “that reservoir of goodness, beyond, and of another kind, that we are able to do each other in the ordinary cause of things.” That’s what I’ve felt this week-an open heart. Clementa Pinckney, the slain pastor of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, President Obama made an unexpected reference to contemporary literature:
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |