![]() Chesterton an agreeable dinner companion. I suspect Robinson might find the Catholic apologist G.K. Grant’s memoirs, in Mark Twain, in Willa Cather, in Hemingway.” After reading two of her collections of essays, Absence of Mind and When I Was A Child I Read Books, I believe that Emerson and William James in Varieties of Religious Experience can be counted if not influences then inspirations. James Wood, though, casts a wider net, “There is a familiar American simplicity, which is Puritan and colloquial in origin, ‘a sort of ecstatic fire that takes things down to the essential’, as Robinson has it in Gilead. We recognize it in the Puritan sermon, in Jonathan Edwards, in Ulysses S. One might see in Gilead, Home, Lila and Jack - her novels about the families of two Iowa Presbyterian ministers who are close friends - a certain cloistered sensibility in common with Georges Bernanos’s Diary of A Country Priest, but no definite association. ![]() ![]() There is little trace of the secondhand in her fiction or nonfiction. Marilynne Robinson is an American original. ![]()
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