Saturday, November 08, 2014

Marilynne Robinson’s Lila – a great achievement in contemporary US fiction

Lila, the latest in Robinson’s acclaimed Gilead series, is favourite to win the US National Book award. Sarah Churchwell asks what the trilogy tells us about modern America

Marilynne Robinson
‘Literature has enough whale hunts and sword fights’ … Marilynne Robinson. Photograph: Lisa Carpenter/PR
In 1980, Marilynne Robinson published her first novel, Housekeeping, which was hailed as an instant classic. For the next 25 years she published no fiction, but several essays and two non-fiction books: Mother Country, a controversial account of the disaster at what is now Sellafield , and The Death of Adam, a collection of provocative polemical essays. In 2004, she unexpectedly published a second novel, Gilead, which won the Pulitzer prize, and was widely extolled. Four years later she returned to the fictional terrain of Gilead, Iowa, with Home, which won the Orange prize for fiction. And now comes Lila, the third Gilead novel; it is a finalist for this year’s National Book award, announced this month, and many people consider it a favourite to win. 

After just four novels, Robinson is frequently named one of America’s most significant writers; the Gilead novels in particular have been heaped with praise, regularly appearing on lists of the greatest contemporary American fiction. But this does not mean they have always been thoroughly understood. Robinson is known for the religious convictions that fortify her work, but her theological preoccupations are part of a larger moral vision that is not incompatible with a redoubtable scepticism. In particular, the Gilead novels can be read as an act of national and cultural recovery, resurrecting powerful ghosts to remind America of a forgotten moral lineage.
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