Volume 52, Number 10 · June 9, 2005
'A Note of the Miraculous'
By Joan Acocella
Gilead
by Marilynne Robinson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 247 pp., $23.00
Marilynne Robinson's first novel, Housekeeping, published in 1980, was a very big hit. It was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; it won the PEN/ Faulkner Award. The reviewers loved it and, seemingly, were also grateful to it, for while Housekeeping had all of modernism's painful knowledge, it showed none of the renunciations of clarity and unity that the modernists—not to speak of the postmodern types, who were already around—felt that such knowledge required. In Housekeeping life was dark, life was crazy. Yet these facts were rendered in a prose that, even at its most subjective, was clean and plain and beautiful.
Review, 5267 words
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