Marilynne Robinson on Faith, Love, and Politics

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

News, Wnyc, David, Arts, Yorker, Society & Culture, Storytelling, Books, New, Remnick, Politics

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 6 October 2020

⏱️ 20 minutes

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Summary

Marilynne Robinson’s new novel, “Jack,” is the fourth to be set among the world and people of a fictional town called Gilead, Iowa. The novelist grew up in Idaho, and, when she moved to the flatter country of Iowa, she “noticed that the landscape had a very high number of little colleges scattered over it,” she tells David Remnick, that were sometimes the oldest buildings in a town. “I wanted to know who had built these things, that this was how you would settle an empty landscape. And that was when I came across the abolitionist movement. Those were the people who did this.” From that history and culture, Robinson imagined Gilead and the old preacher named John Ames who narrates the first book in her series. “Jack” concerns the son of Ames’s closest friend, who was disgraced and left Gilead. The book finds Jack, who is white, in St. Louis and in a predicament: he is in love with a Black woman, at a time when an interracial relationship was a scandal and, in some places, a crime. Plus, the début novelist Douglas Stuart. After two decades of working in the fashion industry and dreaming about writing, Stuart recently published an acclaimed first novel, “Shuggie Bain.” He showed us around his old stomping grounds in New York’s garment district.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:09.5	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Marilynne is one of the most admired fiction
0:15.7	writers in America. In particular, she's known for her depiction of Midwestern life and more unusual spiritual life.
0:24.4	Robinson grew up in Idaho, but long ago relocated to Iowa, and the landscape there, the history there, made quite an impression on her and her imagination.
0:34.6	When I went to Iowa, where I went because of the writers program there, I noticed that the landscape had a very high number of little colleges scattered over it, and big colleges and significant colleges, you know.
0:50.0	Often the oldest structures in any community is the college, which is a very extraordinary thing.
0:56.5	Places like Grinnell, you know.
0:58.7	And so I wanted to know who had built these things, that this was how you would settle an empty landscape.
1:05.7	And that was when I came across the abolitionist movement.
1:09.6	Those were the people who did this. And they, you know,
1:15.8	they felt, as people often say, that, you know, knowledge is power, that knowledge is freedom,
1:22.2	that, you know, in order to create a culture in which slavery could not be introduced or could not flourish.
1:30.6	One major antidote would be education.
1:34.9	As she thought about that history, Robinson imagined and brought to life an Iowa town called
1:40.5	Gilead. That became the title of her 2004 novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize.
1:46.4	Gilead is narrated by an aging preacher named John Ames, and at the heart of the book is a
1:51.8	profound question, how should Christians respond to our country's legacy of racial oppression?
1:58.4	More books set in the world of Gilead followed, Home, Lila, and now a fourth
2:03.3	book called Jack. Jack is Jack Bouten, the son of John Ames' closest friend. One of the reasons that I
2:11.0	have written the books that followed Gilead is because, you know, I have to focus when I write a novel, and I really do. I realize that.
2:20.6	But there are all these peripheral characters, you know.
2:24.5	They are strong presences in my imagination that have seemed to me, one after another,
	...

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