Gilead

I’m a little unhappy with the only poem I have for workshop this week– I’m thinking about going over to the museum Friday morning and trying to recharge enough to get something else down on paper, even if I don’t get everyone’s comments in time.

But I have been doing a lot of good reading this week! Right now I’m rereading Gilead, Marilynne Robinson’s second novel and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Housekeeping and Gilead are two of my favorite novels ever, and in rereading, I have a clearer grasp of why.

I am the kind of reader who loves writers who work wonders at the sentence level– complicated plots and twists are okay, but I love a good sentence, the kind that makes me stop and read it again, makes me want to dog-ear the page and copy each sentence into a journal and make everyone I know read it. Michael Chabon is that kind of writer for me too, so many sentences full of polysyllabic rhythms, dazzling metaphors, multiple clauses and rich vocabulary. Robinson’s sentences are not like that– they, like her writing as a whole, are deceptively simple on the surface, profound and provocative below. She can marry the right image to the right concept in a way that makes it seem inevitable, like no one else should ever describe that phenomenon differently again. I’m in love with too many to repeat them all here, but here’s a pair of my favorites:

The sprinkler is a magnificent invention because it exposes raindrops to sunshine….Well, but you two are dancing around in your iridescent little downpour, whooping and stomping as sane people ought to do when they encounter a thing so miraculous as water.