By David Marchese in the NYT (thanks to Mike C.)
Toward the end of the interview Robinson talks about President Joe Biden and his age: “I’m less than a year younger than Joe Biden, so I believe utterly in his competence, his brilliance, his worldview. I really do. You have to live to be 80 to find this out: Anybody under 50 feels they’re in a position to condescend to you. You get boxed into this position where people who deal with you are making assumptions about your intellect. It’s very disturbing. Most people my age are just fine. What can I say? It’s a kind of good fortune that America is categorically incapable of accepting: that someone with a strong institutional memory, who knows how things are supposed to work, who was habituated to their appropriate functioning is president. I consider him a gift of God. All 81 years of him.”
Here’s the full article: For years, I had a secondhand paperback copy of Marilynne Robinson’s 1980 novel, “Housekeeping,” on my bookshelf that I never got around to reading. Then one day I picked it up. Not altogether too long later, I put it down, finished. In the plain-spokenness of its language, the grace and dignity of its characters, the simplicity of its story and its intimations of spiritual transcendence, “Housekeeping” is a book that transformed how I see my place in the world. (And I’m not alone: Former President Barack Obama has talked about how Robinson’s work influenced him.) Robinson, who for years taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, hasn’t given us a new novel since “Jack” in 2020, but she does have a new nonfiction book that will be published next month. “Reading Genesis” is, as the title suggests, Robinson’s literary analysis of the first book of the Old Testament — one writer’s appreciation of the enduring work of others. Like so much of Robinson’s writing, the book is alive with questions of kindness, community and how to express what we so often struggle to put into words. “An argument that I make in the book,” Robinson says, puckishly implying a counterargument to contemporary mores, “is that God is patient, loves human beings, suspends judgment and is not inclined toward punitive behaviors.”
To start, I don’t think I’m making any great leap in saying that the subject of goodness is something you often write about. I think that’s true.
Looking around our country right now, goodness and grace and mercy feel in short supply. I wonder if that makes you think any differently about the work that you do or have done. Maybe it makes it feel more urgent? Maybe it feels more difficult? Well, I have to say I’m very surprised, shocked, disillusioned perhaps by the turn that things have taken in this country in the last decade or so. The vulgarity and mercilessness that have entered public conversation, and a kind of meagerness and unwillingness to be a source of benefit to the people in the country at large. A stinginess has settled in that’s intellectual and economic and very appalling to me, and contrary to any notion that I have of what is good.
What do you think we could do about it? We have to rethink some very basic things. Genesis has a lot to do with the way people who claim to be religious understand the nature of God. I think it has in various ways been badly misinterpreted. I think that idea that people can claim the word “God,” often in association with something bizarre, like the word “guns,” and feel that they’ve taken the position of righteousness, that’s just a terrible corruption of the whole idea of religion.
Do you still go to church? Well, I moved. The church of my heart is in Iowa City. They stream their services, and I watch them here in New York.1
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Robinson splits her time between upstate New York and California. I keep meaning to attach myself to another church, but I just love watching the old faces, hearing the old songs. I’ve got to get over it. (continued)