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The timing might have been cynical: Gilead, Marilynne Robinson's novel about a minister, won the Pulitzer Prize, and then Picador reissued Robinson's essays on religion, The Death of Adam. Marketing or not, in an era of blockbuster publishing these two books are a windfall for complexity, and they benefit from being read together, even as they register different tones. Where Gilead is elegiac and generous, for example, The Death of Adam is for the most part blunt and tendentious, and yet somehow Robinson manages to have her cake and eat it too. On the one hand, she scorches the neglect and caricature of traditional religion; on the other, she gives us a rare convincing portrait of simple, complete piety. It is as if the same author wrote Leviticus and Psalms. Dylan, transforming folk, moves on to rock and roll. The narrator of Gilead is, if anything, too good, too saintly; the essays too vitriolic and exaggerated. Read as from two different writers, these tendencies might grate; from a single author's mind, they harmonize precisely because they contain their opposites. In this way, the portrait of orthodoxy sometimes asserted in the essays as Calvinism is nuanced and textured with more humanist ideals. Gilead makes this clear, as the novel reads and clarifies the essays rather than the other way around.
Robinson's thesis in The Death of Adam is that American culture, shaped and nourished by a rich religious tradition, has, at best, ignored its own heritage or, at worst, shown contempt for it. "We need to ask ourselves how it has come about," the theologian Karl Barth remarked, "that something that did speak once will no longer speak to us." The question vexes Robinson, and at times she seems astonished and wounded: "I miss civilization and I want it back." Other times she is bitter and polemical, referring, for example, to a time "when people still had sensibilities and encouraged them in one another." She dismisses a "mad cheerfulness in Darwinism," and, finding Freud's ideas "remarkably meager and charmless" wonders "what in the world could have moved us to choose anything so graceless and ugly?"
The way Robinson personalizes her outrage is effective. She comes across as a parishioner speaking, not a pundit declaiming; instead of...