Customer Reviews
Not really at home - By: Paul Callick, 06 Aug 2007 
I came to this book fresh from reading her two novels, full of expectation. But it's disappointing. She simply doesn't seem at homein this genre. In an essay form she tries to expand her sharp observations into longer arguments, with definitions & examples, & counter-examples etc. It's not a mode she seems at ease with, & too often her points become sketchy & even amateurishin their polemical style. I winced (because of the awkwardness of it) where it reads weakly like a newspaper column griping about modern America & the loss of its Christian (ie Calvinist) heritage. The book does try sometimes at the theological side of it all, but it wants to have a general readership as well as a scholarly one at ease with the history of ideas & with theology, & it becomes stranded between the two. So if you've not read Robinson yet, I'd advise sticking to the two wonderful novels. 'Gilead' is her most serious working through of the puritan heritage, done notin essay form butin layered narration & meditative prose.
Marilynne Robinson is brilliant - By: , 12 Apr 1999 
If you've been wondering what Sylvie has been up to these many years, wonder no more. The introduction alone is worth the price of the book--a humbling lessonin how much care is neededin using a language.
saeva indignatio wrote these essays - By: , 17 Dec 1998 Robinson's furious impatience with drivel & "priggishness" (her essay on Puritans & prigs occupied my students at Providence College for several days) may come from her position at Iowa, which obliges her to listen to bright young things who all think alike. These sentences are often white hot. Her essay into Calvin's thought may be more bold than tempered by long study of the historical problem of Puritanism, but the art with which she constructs the essay -- really a brace of essays -- redeems her purpose, which is to startle the reader out of cant. Lapidary takes on a new meaning when used to describe these pieces: they are not only cunningly arranged & precisely cut, they are hard as diamond.
