ABSTRACT
Marilynne Robinson has long been considered America’s most un-contemporary living novelist. Known for her fiction’s complex combination of rhetoric, religiosity, and American history, the author has fans as diverse as former US president Barack Obama, former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, and controversial American novelist Bret Easton Ellis. 1 Despite mainstream success, however, critical appreciation of Robinson largely centres on her reputation as a historical novelist, the Christianity of her central characters further marking her as an outlier in the landscape of twenty-first-century literary fiction. When her debut novel Housekeeping was published in 1980, the author’s slow and richly metaphorical prose, which is deeply indebted to nineteenth-century American authors like Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, and Henry David Thoreau (Robinson 2012: xiv), was described as a ‘transfiguration’ of ‘the ordinary human condition’ (Broyard 1981) in a rave review for The New York Times. As Joan Acocella (2005) later wrote: ‘[R]eviewers loved it and, seemingly, were also grateful to it, for while Housekeeping had all of modernism’s painful knowledge, it showed none of the renunciations of clarity and unity that the modernists – not to speak of the postmodern types, who were already around – felt that such knowledge required.’
