![]() ![]() Robert Boughton struggles to save his wayward son from drinking himself into the ground. ![]() Her characters anticipate the glory beyond, but they also know the valley of the shadow of death (and they can name that Psalm, too). (Our Puritan forefathers wrote and worried plenty about salvation, but they had no use for novels.) In a way that few novelists have attempted and at which fewer have succeeded, Robinson writes about Christian ministers and faith and even theology, and yet her books demand no orthodoxy except a willingness to think deeply about the inscrutable problem of being. ![]() These three exquisite books constitute a trilogy on spiritual redemption unlike anything else in American literature. ![]() And now comes “ Lila,” already longlisted for the National Book Award, involving the same few people in Gilead, Iowa, “the kind of town where dogs slept in the road.” It’s hard to imagine those accolades meant much to the Midwestern Calvinist, but four years later she published a companion novel called “ Home,” which won the Orange Prize and more enthusiastic praise. In 2004, Marilynne Robinson, a legendary teacher at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, returned to novels after a 24-year hiatus and published “ Gilead,” which won a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Critics Circle Award and a spot on best-of-the-year lists everywhere. ![]()
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