In the beginning: neither fish nor fowl | Sebastian Milbank

This article is from the July 2024 issue of The Critic. Why not subscribe to the full magazine? We’re currently offering five issues for just £10.

I I have a confession to make: I don’t understand Marilynne Robinson. She has no shortage of celebrity fans, from historian Tom Holland and Oprah to Barack Obama. The phrase “greatest living American/Christian novelist” is thrown around a lot. I can’t idea by Marilynne Robinson, who embodies the piety of small-town Midwestern music in the same way that Bruce Springsteen embodied the Rust Belt, Flannery O’Connor spoke for the Catholic South, or Cormack McCarthy rekindled rugged individualism.

When Robinson, already hailed as a modern literary-religious prophet, wrote a book about Genesis, it was received in much the same way as Moses descended from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments in his hand: with rave reviews in media across the political spectrum.

But whatever other people find in her work, whatever torch burns eternally on her literary altar, just wasn’t there when I looked for it. There’s no nice way to put it, but after the first sentence of her writing I was bored and looking for an exit. Her latest book, her most ambitious foray into theology yet, has only pushed me deeper into literary outer darkness, and I felt completely left out of the party.

The book itself is divided into two parts – the second half is simply the translation of Genesis from the King James Bible, while the first half contains Robinson’s commentary. And this is where the problems begin. There are no chapters, no index, no footnotes or endnotes. This is, of course, a feature of Robinson’s novels, and I noticed with grim familiarity the long sentences, rambling paragraphs and subsections punctuated by the infamous asterisks she is so fond of sprinkling throughout her works.

Whether or not this is literary defensible, in a nonfiction book, especially one that stretches over 230 pages, it is extraordinarily off-putting. It has a stream of consciousness feel to it, and when you’re trying to convey abstract ideas, it’s just hopeless: I kept losing the thread.

If readers think I’m unfairly denouncing the work because of its format, I’d ask them to consider that books aren’t written in the void. Robinson turns not just to a text but to a tradition: commentary on Scripture. And that’s exactly what she’s focused on, rather than a standalone work of theology, with a clear chronological approach. This genre has a format that has remained largely unchanged from Augustine to Calvin. Such commentaries are structured strictly around the text; Calvin’s own commentary on Genesis is written in such a way that one can focus on specific chapters, passages, and even individual words.

The simple trick of placing Genesis in the King James Bible at the end of the book and dividing it into sections would place Robinson’s work in this ancient tradition and make it much more readable.

I suspect that these editorial choices are attributable either to Robinson herself or to the publisher’s deference to her. If it is clear from the structure of the work that it aims at commenting on Scripture, it is no less clear that it would struggle to live up to the rigorous accuracy typical of commentary on Scripture.

So what, you may ask? As other reviewers have already suggested, this is intended to be a literary, not an academic or even apologetic, treatise on the Holy Scriptures. Francis Spufford writes in New York Timesdefends the book as follows: “Marilynne Robinson’s Reading Genesis is the book of a writer, not of a scholar; it contains no footnotes.

Its power lies in the particular reading it offers us of one of the world’s foundational texts, which is also one of the foundations of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s mind and faith. We want to know what Robinson thinks of Genesis for the same reason we want to know what Tolstoy thought of it.”

But this is precisely where I think Robinson fails. The book is neither fish nor fowl—it ​​is far too long and too referential to be a halfway entertaining poetic reflection on Scripture, and far too imprecise, vague, and poorly structured to function on the level of a philosophical or theological commentary.

Most unforgivably, the place where one might expect a useful theological-literary synthesis—textual analysis—is the book’s weakest aspect. Robinson, like a competent Calvinist minister, draws endless (if repetitive) instructive lessons and observations from Genesis, but says remarkably little about its language, especially as it presents itself so consistently in the King James Bible.

A truly surprising omission is any substantive discussion of the act of creation itself or any in-depth consideration of the story of Adam and Eve. The first two chapters of Genesis are discussed exclusively for only nine pages. Some interesting lines of thought are briefly touched upon, but then we are suddenly at the Flood, with the creation of all reality in the rearview mirror.

Despite Robinson’s “reverence” for the first chapters of Genesis, she seems to be in a great hurry to leave them behind. This seems odd, not only because it is the most metaphysically rich part of Genesis, but also because it is the most poetic. In her spirit of Midwestern simplicity, a single elegant touch of poetry is introduced, which is quite respectable, and having got past this sufficient allusion to aesthetics, we turn to the practical task of unfolding a smooth, narrative prose.

After praising the opening words of Genesis as “a masterpiece of compression” and reassuring readers that Job’s account of the morning stars singing together, while it sounds “not strictly monotheistic,” poses no threat to the deity, who can express his joy at will, Robinson then plunges into what she evidently prefers—minding exhaustively on the intricacies of human relationships, for which Genesis provides ample material.

It is a reading that brings us down hard to earth and draws us into the tangle of obligations it entails. We have little idea of ​​the dreamlike wonder of the angels hovering over events, or of a supernatural destiny being prepared in the wanderings and torments of humanity exposed to exile, death and the Flood. All this is morally uplifting in a dry way, but it is hard to imagine that it inspires the kind of faith for which men would die.

I’m afraid I’m coming back to my own prejudices – I don’t understand Marilynne Robinson. The relentless focus on the small human relationships, without rich poetic allegory and the division of the text into essayistic fragments that slowly analyze arguments and observations, just makes me groan.

Far from bringing Genesis to life, Robinson’s book recreates for me the worst, most mind-numbing kind of Bible education, in which Hebrew characters beget, kill, chastise, praise, or flee each other, forming one amorphous soup. Fans of Gilead might love this. But it’s not for me.