Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica,

I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

I am very proud to have with me,

Marilynne Robinson,

who is here to discuss her novel

Home for the second week.

As you know, when I talk about a writer or a novelist for several weeks,

it's because I think the book and the writer are very special.

And I wanted to talk about a quality here that I think perhaps many readers and critics haven't been

able to describe or isolate.

I was talking to one of my most wonderful friends and a good reader about Gilead after it came out,

and he said that he found the book too wholly.

And I said, no, I think it's, you know, helping us to make distinctions in piety.

And that this character is often flawed in complicated ways.

And yes, no matter what he says,

he's going to sound richly good,

but he's prone to jealousy of an extreme sort and retaliation, retaliatory vengefulness for fantasy slights.

...