How Marilynne Robinson Reads Scripture

In her hands, the Book of Genesis becomes a precursor to the novel.

- Judith Shulevitz

Marilynne Robinson’s novels always leave me with a visceral impression of celestial light. Heavenly bulbs seem to switch on at climactic moments, showing a world as undimmed as it was at Creation. “I love the prairie! So often I have seen the dawn come and the light flood over the land and everything turn radiant at once,” writes John Ames, the narrator of Gilead, an elderly preacher approaching death as if returning to the birth of being. “And God saw the light, that it was good,” the Bible says, and Ames sees that it’s good, too: “that word ‘good’ so profoundly affirmed in my soul that I am amazed I should be allowed to witness such a thing.”

A primordial sun also shines upon Jack Boughton, the prodigal son of Robinson’s Gilead quartet (Gilead, Home, Lila, and Jack). In Home, Jack restores the broken-down family car, an old DeSoto, buffing its chrome detailing to its former resplendence. It’s the only time we ever see the shame-riddled Jack truly at ease. He proudly slides the DeSoto out of the barn and “[floats] away, gentling the gleaming dirigible through the shadows of arching elm trees, light dropping on it through their leaves like confetti.” He’s bathed in grace, and when he takes his sister and father for a ride in the countryside, the drab Iowa fields have become an Eden, bright and fertile: “The terraced hills glittered with new corn.”