A Spectacular Burst of Light without Antecedent: A Review of Marilynne Robinson’s READING GENESIS
Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2024), 344 pages.
I’m conflicted about Marilynne Robinson’s writing.
When I read her essays, I wonder if I can’t understand them because she is so much smarter than me and I lack the minimum intelligence necessary to learn from her, let alone critique her. When I read Robinson, I sometimes feel like Michael Scott from The Office, needing her to stop with the eloquence and “talk to me like I am five.”
Other times I wonder if the problem is not with me. Perhaps Robinson is actually not as good of a writer as everyone says she is because her essays contain too many contorted paragraphs. Sometimes her prose appears to swat at intellectually nuanced “flies” only she can see.
And when I read her material that has an explicit focus on God and the Bible, I become even more conflicted. Sometimes I wonder if her view of God is so much better than my own—and her view of the Bible is so much more sophisticated than my own—that perhaps I understand neither God nor the Bible as well as I should. Yet in other moments, I think of her in the same way as I think of many mainline Protestant pastors and professors, as those who see some truths about God and the Bible rightly and yet also see some really big truths really wrongly.
Having read her much anticipated and much acclaimed latest book, Reading Genesis, I now believe all of this can be true at once.
Hence my confliction.
Who Is Marilynne Robinson?
You might not have ever heard of Marilynne Robinson. But in literary writing circles, not just Christian literary writing circles, she’s a legend. I’ll put it this way. When one podcast interviewer had her on his show a few years ago, he said that lots of people want to interview former President Barack Obama, but, he noted, Barack Obama went out of his way to interview Robinson. She’s the sort of author who, even when writing non-fiction about the Bible, has her book reviewed by The New York Times and The New Yorker, as well as Christianity Today and The Gospel Coalition.
I was introduced to Robinson’s writing in seminary. A professor assigned us the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead, the first book in a series of four novels. I loved then and still love now so much about the central character John Ames, an aging pastor in rural Iowa, and how Ames cares for his flock, his young son, and his unlikely wife. I’ve read all the novels in the series at least twice. In fact, for a few years, one of my favorite things on YouTube was to listen to Marilynne Robinson read her own novels. You can hear this example when she reads an extended excerpt from the third novel in the series, Lila. Robinson reads so monotone that her words become engrossing, like a rock ballad that constantly feels on the verge of a big crescendo.
Robinson also has had a key role in carrying forward the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a group connected to the University of Iowa’s master in fine arts program. (You can think of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop as a kind of Harvard Law for writers.) I don’t imagine my life will ever allow the opportunity, but many times I’ve wanted to apply to the Writers’ Workshop and experience the legacy of writers such as Flannery O’Connor and teaching from instructors such as Robinson.
I cannot do a full review of her latest book Reading Genesis because, as I mentioned above, I might not be smart enough to write that review. I am, however, very familiar with Genesis itself, having preached slowly through different subsections of the book and having worked on an extended writing project that engages with the Abraham narrative. So here we go.
A Close Reading of Genesis
I can say positively that Reading Genesis offers a close reading of the first book in the Bible. Robinson trains her attention on the details using the tools of great literature: repetition, parallelism, inclusio, characterization, foreshadowing, intentional ambiguity, authorial intent, and so on.
I also appreciate how—in the best sense, not the worst—Reading Genesis stands on the author’s own authority. Even when Robinson mentions intricacies of cultures that paralleled Israel’s culture, stories from ancient Canaanite and Babylonian religious texts, her book has zero footnotes and almost zero referencing of “so-and-so” said “such-and-such.” This omission makes for a refreshing departure from traditional commentaries.
And her close reading often leads to profound insights. I’ll quote in full this extended paragraph from near the end of the book, a paragraph about the importance of Genesis for the rest of the Scriptures juxtaposed with the strikingly ordinary lives of the key families within Genesis.
Genesis can hardly be said to end. In it certain things are established—the nature of Creation and the spirit in which it was made; the nature of humankind; how and in what spirit the Creator God enters into relation with His human creatures. The whole great literature of Scripture, unfolding over centuries, will proceed on the terms established in this book. So Genesis is carried forward, in the law, in the psalms, in the prophets, itself a spectacular burst of light without antecedent but with a universe of consequences. This might seem like hyperbolic language to describe a text largely given over to the lives of people in many ways so ordinary that it is astonishing to find them in an ancient text. This realism by itself is a sort of miracle. These men and women saw the face of God, they heard His voice, and yet life for them came down to births and deaths, love, transgression, obedience, shame, and sorrow, everything done or borne in the course of the characterization of God, for Whom every one of us is a child of Adam, made in His image. God’s bond with Jacob, truly a man of sorrows, is a radical theological statement. (224)
I could go on quoting many instances of her helpful insights, the fruit of her close reading, but I’ll only note three final appreciations.
First, when you read between the lines about who she imagines to be her typical audience, you get the sense that she’s probably not only a bit odd to evangelical readers but also odd to liberal readers as well. “If you mapped Robinson’s novelistic reading onto contemporary scholarship of the Bible,” writes Francis Spufford in his New York Times review, “you’d find her in several camps at once.” Frequently when I expect her to endorse without qualification some stronghold of liberalism, such as skepticism toward supernatural elements within Genesis or the documentary hypothesis (which tries to discern supposed multiple authors of Genesis), she doesn’t. Instead of endorsing the skepticism of the supernatural or the documentary hypothesis, she critiques them, or at least nuances the views in a better direction. Indeed, part of the impetus for her in writing the book came from her own frustrations with these modern readings.
To give another example of this, Robinson concurs with modern, liberal understandings that the Genesis flood narrative is downstream and derivative from the creation and flood stories from other religious texts, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh. At the point where the stories have the most similarity, however, she argues that Genesis intentionally subverts and betters the picture of God’s character than what is found in the other religious texts. “The Genesis narrative as a whole can be thought of as a counterstatement of this kind,” she writes, “retelling the Creation in terms that reject in essential points the ancient Near Eastern characterization of the divine, of humankind, and of Creation itself” (28).
Second, I appreciate that Robinson does a good job noting the faults of those in the Bible, especially the faults of the patriarchs, rather than casting them as heroes of the stories. “Readers can be shocked by the fallibility of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” she writes. “But the patriarchs are not offered as paragons.” These faults highlight the “breadth of God’s loyalty to all the descendants of Adam” (84).
Finally, I appreciate that all two-hundred and thirty pages have no chapter breaks, having only a gap in the prose every so often, signaled by a blank space or a few asterisks to mark the beginning of a new line of thought. I love it. Robinson uses this same structure in each novel of her four-part series. Rather than finding this breach of convention daunting, I find it aesthetically enjoyable.
A Confusing Reading of Genesis
I also find her reading of Genesis confusing. Sometimes Robinson feels confusing because she seems to simultaneously hold a high view of Scripture along with a view of Scripture so nuanced that I can’t quite understand her view.
I also find her confusing because some sentences get so contorted that I can’t figure out what she is affirming or denying. For example, consider this sentence from a section about the meaning of life. “If [life] is the essence of everything, a breath of the very Spirit of God, it is fit and right that, first, as the basis of all understanding, of all righteousness, life itself should be properly felt and valued” (47). You can try to read that sentence a few more times, and you might get closer to the meaning than I can, but I’m still puzzled. I think she’s saying something like, “If life from God is everywhere, we should respect life more.” But I don’t really know. And so go many such sentences, sometimes even full paragraphs—alas, even full pages. On page 64 there sits a single paragraph that begins on the previous page and extends to the next page. Woof, that’s a big paragraph. All this, again, leads to my confliction.
I’ll give another example, this time from the copy on the jacket cover of the book. I know authors themselves often do not write the promotional material on the jacket cover, but it accurately illustrates the kind of “almost-orthodox-view-but-maybe-not-at-all-orthodox-view” that appears throughout the book.
The cover states that Robinson intends to appreciate Genesis’s “greatness as literature, its rich articulation and exploration of themes that resonate through the whole of Scripture.” Great, I think to myself. I’m here for that. Genesis is not less than great literature, and I’d love to learn more about the many ways the themes at the beginning of the Bible ricochet right through until the end.
Then the promotional blurb continues, “Marilynne Robinson’s Reading Genesis . . . is a powerful consideration of the profound meanings and promise of God’s enduring covenant with humanity.” I’m here for that too.
But then notice the twist at the end of this final sentence. “This magisterial book radiates gratitude for the constancy and benevolence of God’s abiding faith in Creation.”
Wait, wait, wait—“God’s abiding faith in Creation”?
Reading Genesis well should indeed lead us, I believe, to gratitude. But does reading Genesis produce gratitude for “God’s abiding faith in Creation”? It does not. The dysfunctional family that left Eden clothed in animal skins soon sees one brother kill another brother. And on and on each member of the original family tree goes, sinning spectacularly right through to the end of the book. The only good reading of Genesis is the reading that sees God, in his long-suffering of his loving-kindness, as abiding with a humanity that merits no faith at all. A reading of Genesis that attempts to foreground God’s supposed abiding faith in humanity is not a good reading of Genesis, even when done so with beautiful prose.
Another example of this “almost orthodox” view is seen in a quote I used above. She wrote about how the faults of the patriarchs highlight the “breadth of God’s loyalty to all the descendants of Adam” (84). Later, in a beautiful section of the book on this same theme, she writes “of God’s loyalty to humankind through [all of humanity’s] disgrace and failure and even crime” (174). But the Scriptures do not teach God’s broad loyalty to all humanity and to every person born of Adam, so much as they teach God’s special loyalty and gentleness to the special line of chosen people, a chosen subset within all people. In other places, Robinson seems to know this distinction well. “Out of the inconceivable assertion of power from which everything has emerged and will emerge there came a small family of herdsmen who were of singular interest to the Creator.” Can you see why reading Robinson can be so difficult?
Evangelical readers will also be frustrated by Robinson’s cryptic comments about the historicity of Genesis. At times she seems to suggest that she believes Genesis gives us real history. “From this point in Scripture,” she writes about Noah’s family, “we begin to enter history” (66). But what is she implying about the historicity of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel? At one point in an aside, she writes, “[King] David, whom I take to be historical . . .” (79). Okay, she takes David to be in some sense historical, but do we have a true, historical account of him and others in the Scriptures? It’s not as easy to tell how she views this. Speaking of the exodus, she writes, “Debate about whether these events actually occurred, whether the figures involved are in any sense historical, can never be resolved and need not be” (199). I disagree. When the Bible presents stories as though they did happen in history, it matters whether they did.
I’ll also mention Robinson’s book also has little mention of Jesus. One might respond to this comment with pushback, saying, Yeah, neither does Genesis itself, and it’s only my evangelical gospel-preaching impulse that “needs” to see him everywhere.
I can receive that. I neither expected nor would I require each section of her book to read like a good Christian sermon. But I would have appreciated hearing more about how all these meandering stories in Genesis of nomadic tribes only find their ultimate meaning in the promise and fulfillment of the serpent crusher with a bruised heel prophesied in the third chapter of the book. This is not merely my reading of Genesis but Jesus’s reading. To an audience more familiar with Genesis than any of us, Jesus once said, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, and it is they that bear witness about me” (John 5:39).
Robinson claims in the opening sentence, “The Bible is a theodicy, a meditation on the problem of evil” (3). And what the Bible is generally, Genesis (as well as the book of Job) is specifically, a work exploring the tensions between the goodness and sovereignty of God in a world filled with evil. Yet without a robust engagement with the cross of Christ, his resurrection, and the second coming, I am not surprised Robinson struggles to present satisfactory answers to the problem. Yes, she is correct that the story of Joseph underscores with literal words that what his brothers meant for evil, God meant for good (Gen. 50:20). Behold the beauty of providence. But where the story of Joseph only points through the theodicy glass dimly, the New Testament streams in 4k. God the Father put Jesus forward as a propitiation for sins, writes Paul, “to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus” (Rom. 3:26).
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In the end, I can’t say whether you should buy and read Robinson’s book, which I know makes for an admittedly strange and unsatisfying ending to my review. My own reflections echo the both-and in the title and sentiments of Jared Kennedy’s review, “What Marilynne Robinson Sees and Misses in Genesis.”
Like many other brilliant individuals God has blessed with oodles of talent, Robinson can be hard to pin down and put into convenient, tidy categories. It’s not fair for evangelicals to dismiss her as a mere liberal, as I’m sure some will certainly do. It seems to me that as Robinson ministers in her own context, her audience would see her as advocating many views that are more often associated with fundamentalism and evangelicalism. We need to appreciate what she does see so well.
At the same time, here is the best I can say: if you do the hard work of giving her words a close reading, as she gives a close reading to Genesis, you might end up as I did, both blessed and conflicted.
* Photo by Jonny Gios on Unsplash