Here’s to You, Mrs. Robinson

The Washington Post recently interviewed Marilynne Robinson, the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Gilead, and most recently, of Home. Here’s how the interview begins:

If you want to understand how different Marilynne Robinson
is from other contemporary novelists — how different, in fact, from
most contemporary human beings — all you need to do is walk into her
dining room.

“These are my favorite books in here,” says the author of
“Housekeeping,” “Gilead” and the recently published “Home” as she
motions toward the bookcase that fills one end of the small space.
“See, look: Calvin, Calvin, Calvin.”

Sure enough, here are the multivolume “Commentaries” of the great
16th-century Protestant theologian, whom Robinson considers one of the
most falsely caricatured figures in history. Here are the two volumes
of Calvin’s “Institutes of the Christian Religion,” without which she
thinks you can’t understand Herman Melville. Surrounding these are a multitude of other theological and educational works, few less than a century old.

Read the whole thing. 

HT: James Grant