Garret Keizer, over at Religion Dispatches, has written my new favorite review of Marilynne Robinson’s Home–I like it better than my own review! Take this paragraph for an example:
Perhaps it is Robinson’s profoundly Calvinist sense of the all-sufficiency of Grace, the ultimate irrelevancy of anything we might call merit, that permits her to pull off what amounts to a great artistic miracle: a story unabashedly “about” salvation in which no one “gets saved.” There is nothing in this novel that qualifies as “redemption” of the kind we have come to expect in the 109-page screenplay. No cathartic revelation that leaves the hero better for it, no surprising reversal in which saints are shown to be sinners and sinners saints. Nobody deciding at the last minute not to get on that plane. Yes, Glory has something of an epiphany at the end, but it takes no epiphany on the reader’s part to see the uneasy mix of beatitude and desperation in what she feels. Only a Christian of uncommon mettle could write a novel so untainted by the bastardized tropes of Christian culture. It is as if Robinson told us the Nativity story without once evoking Christmas. In other words, it is as if we were actually—and unremarkably—just there.
Hat tip: more than 95 theses
Carissa Turner Smith is a compulsive reader, writer, and Irish dancer. She earned her Ph.D. in English at Penn State and currently teaches writing and American literature at Charleston Southern University. At age three, she announced that all she wanted to do was “sit at a desk and read and write,” and she has been trying to make good on that promise ever since. Fortunately, she is occasionally distracted from this mission by her husband Stephen and their cheese-obsessed cat. A loyal native of Arkansas, she has always loved the fact that Jesus dwelt in an underappreciated corner of Galilee (see John 1:46). 
