At 'Home' With the Past

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But Robinson's novel is about more than just Jack. It is also the story of his quiet sister, Glory, herself returned home after "failing to take hold in the world." Seemingly invisible to Ames and her own father, she may be the strongest character in the book.

"I think of her as a very strong character," Robinson says, noting that women in mid-20th-century America had to "create a positive existence out of circumstances that didn't always make it easy."

Glory is 38 when the action of "Home" takes place. Robinson was 37 when she published "Housekeeping." Their life stories are very different. Still, it's possible to hear a hint of autobiography in Robinson's words.

'My Own Dialect'

One time when she was around 4 years old, Robinson was sitting on her father's knee, listening to someone praise her older brother for something. "My father said, 'Marilynne can do that, too,' " she recalls. "And whoever it was said, 'Yeah, but David's really exceptional.' And my father said, 'She can do anything she sets her mind to.' "

She thought, "Oh -- what interesting news!"

This was in Idaho, where her father worked for a lumber company. They lived in "quite an unpopulated place" near Lake Pend Oreille, a model for the lake that figures strongly in "Housekeeping." She and her brother used to sleep sometimes on an open porch at her grandparents' house, where "there was nothing around us but mountains and woods. Nothing. No other sound, no other light, nothing.

"The way that mountains sound in a wind, you know, it's impossible not to feel that you are surrounded by deeply living things."

In this wild isolation, she read whatever she could get her hands on: popular novels as well as Poe, Dickens, Twain and Shakespeare. "Especially in bad weather, I would sneak away and write something about 'The Tempest.' "

In college at Pembroke, then the women's arm of Brown, a roommate dared her to take a writing class from postmodernist John Hawkes. "She did me a big favor," Robinson says, because Hawkes proved an encouraging reader of her distinctly pre-modern writing.

Later she flirted with the idea of divinity school. But to a woman, in those days, that looked like "the royal road to marginalization," so she stuck to literature. At the University of Washington, she wrote a dissertation on Shakespeare's early history plays and started playing around with fiction.