Home

I just finished reading Marilynne Robinson's  Home. It tells you a lot about America, family life, religion, racism, and how appalling prejudices of one kind and another can become woven into what is supposed to be a benevolent worldview. 

Home makes sense all by itself but makes even more sense if you know a bit about your bible - adam and eve, the prodigal son, the good samaritan etc. But if you're going to read it you really should read Gilead first. Robinson wrote Gilead some years ago, and a very minor, shadowy figure in that book becomes the main character in Home. My recommendation - read them both!

Comments

[Roberta]

thank you maggi! i just reserved Gilead at my local library. it sounds wonderful.

[Mark Bratton]

Less well known is that Marilynne Robinson has written some profound essays on modern thought in a volume called 'The Death of Adam'. She is a thinker who transmutes her profound learning not into articles in scholarly journals, but into top-class journalism. She has a striking introduction to her chapter on 'Darwinism' which begins:

'American culture has entered a period in which atavism looks to us for all the world like progress. The stripping away of human constraints to liberate great "natural" forces such as captial flow or the (soi-disant) free market has acquired such heady momentum that no one even pauses to wonder whether such forces are indeed paricularly "natural"'

Almost every sentence gives something to ponder. I suspect this volume will be my companion for some time.