At 'Home' With the Past

Entirely on her own terms.

"I wrote 'Housekeeping' thinking that I was writing an unpublishable book, and that gave me an enormous amount of latitude," she says. "And I was just interested in things like what can you do with an extended metaphor, you know?"

She wanted to "step outside what seemed to me to be the conventional language and the conventional posture of contemporary books." She wrote from the landscape she knew, where "I could make weather and vegetation and so on into my own dialect."

After all, "there was nobody else in those woods."

After grad school, married, with two sons, Robinson found herself in western Massachusetts, where her husband was teaching. She asked a writer friend named John Clayton to look at a manuscript.

Clayton assumed it would be an amateur job. But what he read, he says, was "this incredible book" unlike any modern novel he knew. He sent it to his agent, Ellen Levine.

"I remember reading it and sort of catching my breath," Levine recalls. She sold it to Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

"I think they published 3,000 copies of the first edition," Robinson says. But a rave by then-New York Times critic Anatole Broyard gave it a boost, and a paperback sale kept it in print. "Housekeeping" is still selling today.

There wouldn't be another Robinson novel for 23 years.

What happened? Well, there was motherhood, a divorce, a steady job. (In 1989, Robinson accepted a teaching position at the Iowa Writers Workshop. She's still there.) There was at least one false start on a novel. And there were two nonfiction books, each as unusual as Robinson's fiction.

Living for a time in England, she found herself "angry to the depths of my soul" to learn that a nuclear complex there had turned the Irish Sea into a dumping ground for plutonium. In "Mother Country," she asked how this came to be.

"If I could have written only one book in my life," she says, "that would be the book."

Next came "The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought," though essays against modern thought is what they really are. It was here that Robinson undertook to refute the caricature of Calvin as a gloomy, intolerant fanatic.

But the root cause of the two-decade fiction gap may be that Robinson -- having found a unique voice for "Housekeeping" -- had trouble escaping it. "I didn't want to be one voice," she says. Yet she didn't want to sound like her contemporaries, either.

Her solution was to read herself out of modernity.

"I read about the Albigensians, everything in the world," she says, referring to a persecuted sect in medieval France, "simply to create another sort of ecology in my brain." Meanwhile, after moving to Iowa, she started reading about the Midwest. "I can't stand to be in a place that I don't feel I know a history about," she says.

One day, while writing something she wasn't happy with, she found herself channeling an old minister. Finally, she had a novel on her hands. She set it in a town she called Gilead.

Her reading supplied a model: a sleepy southwest Iowa community with a buried, fiery past.

A 'Mythic Home'

Drive toward Tabor, Iowa, on a fine September day and you'll pass rolling fields of corn with golden highlights brought out by the morning sun. In town, you'll notice a bar called Glory Daze on a main street that has seen better times. A few blocks away sits a tiny old white house where Wanda Ewalt, keeper of Tabor's history, is waiting to show you around.

The house belonged to the Rev. John Todd, who helped found Tabor in 1853. A Congregational minister, he was accompanied by other settlers from Oberlin, Ohio, a hotbed of abolitionist fervor. Ewalt points to a portrait of the white-bearded Todd and to an unappetizing lump of hardtack he brought back from his Civil War service.

Then she takes you down to the dirt-floored, cobweb-filled basement where Todd stashed 200 Sharps rifles intended for use by anti-slavery forces in Kansas.

Robinson never took a Todd House tour. One of her sons drove her to Tabor, but she didn't manage to hook up with Ewalt. What she remembers is "the sand that blows across the road and the New England-style green in front of Todd's house and the kind of sleepy, forgotten town that lives on top of all this archaeology of radicalism."

Literally on top: At a convenience store, someone told her about the tunnels built to move escaping slaves from building to building as they passed through Tabor on the underground railroad.

Robinson admires the abolitionists as much as any people in history, and in "Gilead" she created a fictional version of Todd. "Home," by contrast, appears to downplay the struggle for racial justice as a theme. It seems more focused on individual human frailty of the kind personified by Jack Boughton, with his fear that damnation, for him, might be predestined.

Yet here's where the lost "archaeology of radicalism" comes in.

For Jack has fathered a child with a black woman he truly loves. He rests his fading hopes on reconnecting with them. But the specifics of these hopes would so disturb his loving, Christian father -- who also happens to be a classic 1950s Northern racist -- that Jack can't confide in him.

"Oh, it's terrible to interpret your own writing," Robinson says, then proceeds to do just that.

"If Jack could come home and be home, it would mean that in a certain way he would have experienced a restoration of himself." Instead, "this mythic home for him is one that excludes his own family."

Given the town's history, this should not be true. But the idealism of its founders -- who believed not just in ending slavery but in creating a society where the races were truly equal -- is gone. That's a social failure, not a personal one, and it lends the Obama sign in Robinson's window a bit more resonance than it might have for a voter less immersed in the past.

What's next for Robinson?

Well, there's a series of lectures on "how we talk about the mind" to be given this spring at Yale. There's a book about the Old Testament that she put aside to write "Home." If an idea for a new novel should strike her, she will write it.

If and when she does, there's one thing you can be sure of: She won't bring it from any common spring.