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Novelist
& Essayist
Benaroya Hall, Monday,
January 8, 2001
Biography
Excerpt
Selected Works
Links
Biography
Marilynne Robinson was born in 1947 in Sandpoint, Idaho, where she grew
up and attended high school. After graduating from Brown University in
1966, she enrolled in the graduate program in English at the University
of Washington. While writing her dissertation, Robinson began work on
her first novel, Housekeeping (1981). Now regarded by many critics
as an American classic, Housekeeping tells the haunting story of
two girls growing up in rural Idaho in the mid-1900s. It addresses themes
of loss and survival, transience, and coming-of-age. The novel is also
steeped in images of the Northwest’s landscape—lakes, mountains,
and forests—that reflect Robinson’s knowledge of and concern
for the natural world. Housekeeping received the PEN/Hemingway
award for best first novel and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
After the publication of Housekeeping, Robinson began writing essays
and book reviews for Harper’s, Paris Review, and The New
York Times Book Review. She also started teaching, serving as writer-in-residence
and visiting professor at numerous colleges and universities, including
the University of Kent in England, Amherst College, and the University
of Massachusetts. From an essay she wrote for Harper’s, entitled
“Bad News from Britain,” Robinson wrote the controversial book
Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State and Nuclear Pollution
(1989), a finalist for the National Book Award. The book explored the
extensive environmental degradation caused by the British nuclear reprocessing
plant Sellafield.
In the tradition of 19th century novelists who turned to the essay, Robinson
published a critically acclaimed collection in 1998 called The Death
of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought. Through essays on topics ranging
from John Calvin to Darwinism to Freud and 20th century psychologists,
the book examines and critiques the ideas our culture has handed down
to us. Kathleen Norris praised the collection as “a valuable contribution
to American life and letters,” while The New York Times Book Review
observed that “one of Robinson’s great merits as an essayist
is her refusal to take her opinions secondhand. Her book is a goad to
renewed curiosity.”
Although Robinson has published only three books, she is widely regarded
as one of America’s best contemporary writers.
Excerpt
Taken from Housekeeping (1981)
They
searched for her. Word was sent out a hundred miles in every direction
to watch for a young woman in a car which I said was blue and Lucille
said was green. Some boys who had been fishing and knew nothing about
the search had come across her sitting cross-legged on the roof of the
car, which had bogged down in the meadow between the road and the cliff.
They said she was gazing at the lake and eating wild strawberries, which
were prodigiously large and abundant that year. She asked them very pleasantly
to help her push her car out of the mud, and they went so far as to put
their blankets and coats under the wheels to facilitate her rescue. When
they got the Ford back to the road she thanked them, gave them her purse,
rolled down the rear windows, started
the car, turned the wheel as far to the right as it would go, and roared
swerving and sliding across the meadow until she sailed off the edge of
the cliff.
My grandmother spent a number of days in her bedroom. She had an armchair
and a footstool from the parlor placed by the window and looked into the
orchard, and she sat there, food was brought to her there. She was not
inclined to move. She could hear, if not the particular words and conversations,
at least the voices of people in the kitchen, the gentle and formal society
of friends and mourners that had established itself in her house to look
after things. Her friends were very old, and fond of white cake and pinochle.
In twos and threes they would volunteer to look after us, while the others
played cards at the breakfast table. We would be walked around by nervous,
peremptory old men who would show us Spanish coins, and watches, and miniature
jackknives with numerous blades designed to be serviceable in any extremity,
in order to keep us near them and out of the path of possible traffic.
A tiny old lady named Ettie, whose flesh was the color of toadstools and
whose memory was so eroded as to make her incapable of bidding, and who
sat smiling by herself in the porch, took me by the hand once and told
me that in San Francisco, before the fire, she had lived near a cathedral,
and in the house opposite lived a Catholic lady who kept a huge parrot
on her balcony. When the bells rang the lady would come out with a shawl
over her head and she would pray, and the parrot would pray with her,
the woman’s voice and the parrot’s voice, on and on, between
clamor and clangor. After a while the woman fell ill, or at least stopped
coming out on her balcony, but the parrot was still there, and it whistled
and prayed and flirted its tail whenever the bell rang. The fire took
the church and its bells and no doubt the parrot, too, and quite possibly
the Catholic lady. Ettie waved it all away with her hand and pretended
to sleep.
Selected
Works
Housekeeping (1981)
Mother Country (1988)
The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998)
Web
Site Links
Reading guide
to Housekeeping
Poets
& Writers Magazine article
on Housekeeping
New York Times book review
on The Death of Adam
Photo:
Emma Dodge Hanson
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