In the beginning: neither fish nor fowl

Sebastian Milbank

I HAVE A CONFESSION TO MAKE: I DON’T GET Marilynne Robinson. She is not short of high profile fans, from historian Tom Holland and Oprah to Barack Obama. The words “greatest living American/Christian novelist” get thrown around a lot. I can certainly understand the idea of Marilynne Robinson, who represents smalltown Midwestern piety in the same way Bruce Springsteen embodied the Rust Belt, Flannery O’Connor spoke for the Catholic south, or Cormack McCarthy reignited rugged individualism. So when Robinson, already heralded as a modern day literary-religious prophet, wrote a book about Genesis, it was greeted in rather the same fashion as when Moses descended from Mount Sinai bearing the Ten Commandments: with rave reviews in outlets across the political spectrum. But whatever other people find in her work, whatever torch burns…

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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, July 2024

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