Reading Genesis
by Marilynne Robinson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $29)
“On the face of it, Marilynne Robinson should be an ideal reader of Genesis,” said James Wood in The New Yorker. “A novelist who appears to trust in divine intervention the way you or I might trust in a train timetable makes for an intriguingly pious commentator.” But while the deservedly esteemed author of Gilead and Housekeeping is at times masterful in bringing out the intricate interplay between the human and divine in the Bible’s first book, her analysis of Genesis is dramatically constrained by her faith-based insistence that God is good, that God has a benevolent grand plan for humankind, and that any tragedies or darkness that arise before the ultimate revelation of that plan are steps necessary in a way beyond our current understanding. The approach disappoints because “far from obviously being good, the God of the Hebrew Bible comes up short, morally.”
Making the case for the goodness of the God of Genesis “might seem like an uphill battle,” said Briallen Hopper in The New Republic. He floods the Earth to kill all humans but Noah’s family. He murders indiscriminately again when he destroys Sodom and Gomorrah. And he commands Abraham to slay his only son, stopping the filicide only after Abraham has laid Isaac on an altar and raised a knife to complete the deed. Robinson, predictably, assures us that the third of those horror stories merely proved the Judeo-Christian God kinder than prior gods who required human sacrifices. Given such rationalizations, joining Robinson in her deep dive into Genesis “will probably be most satisfying to readers who share her theological commitments.”
But besides defending her God, Robinson is “up to something that should interest her secular readers,” said Judith Shulevitz in The Atlantic. “She wants us to see how radical Scripture is,” compared with earlier epics it draws from. “We move from gods indifferent to our well-being to a God obsessively focused on us,” selecting ordinary people, such as Noah or Abraham, for special fates. While you may dismiss Robinson’s contention that Genesis created a kind of realism, “in her deft hands Genesis becomes a precursor to the novel,” and it’s riveting to see.