At 'Home' With the Past

As others were; I have not seen

As others saw; I could not bring

My passions from the common spring.

Poe wrote these lines in 1830. But they could just as easily have been written by Marilynne Robinson in 2008.

* * *

She doesn't look like a fiercely determined person who declines to play by the rules of the modern world, literary or otherwise. But appearances here -- as with Robinson's modest-seeming but deeply original fiction -- are deceiving.

A tall woman of 64 with a handsome, lined face, she curls forward on the living room couch, an unusually calm poodle at her side. She smiles often and laughs easily, frequently at her own expense.

"I'm not the right person to be driving a car," she says, explaining why she doesn't. "My mind wanders, shall we say." Laughter. A bit later, she's asked about the relative importance in her work of voice and character, as opposed to plot.

"Plot. Not a word I use," she says. "Some people think it's not a concept I have."

This is not entirely true, of course. She managed to work suicide, a train wreck, adolescent rebellion and a climactic fire into "Housekeeping," the now-classic novel that introduced her to the world in 1981, though to list the elements that way is to misrepresent the book's eerie quietness. And in "Gilead," the Pulitzer Prize-winning second novel Robinson published in 2004 -- more later on that two-decade gap -- she grafted a violent branch of the 19th-century conflict over slavery onto what was otherwise a small-town story set in the 1950s.