Housekeeping Blows

I have twice failed to make it through Marilynne Robinson’s acclaimed 1980 novel, Housekeeping, but I was impressed with her article in Harper’s, so I picked up her collection of essays, The Death of Adam, on a whim, and it’s the most powerful set of non-fiction pieces I’ve read from a conservative since Theodore Dalrymple’s Our Culture, What’s Left of It. Robinson is a devout Protestant who champions John Calvin and the Puritans and rips Nietzsche and Darwin, so she ain’t exactly on my team. What she does, though, is challenge liberal dogma with great erudition and intellectual rigor. She refuses to accept judgments about thinkers without deep and pointed attention to the primary texts. She certainly broadened my understanding of Calvin, but more importantly, she reminds you that far too often we have ossified opinions about ideas and people and events we know little about. She makes a powerful case that much of our so-called set of opinions is received, and often that has been passed down from folks who’ve gotten it and on we go. It’s so much easier to read articles about someone than it is to go back and start digging. And while she cherrypicks Nietzsche unfairly to suit her case, the strength of her writing, the clarity of her argumentation and the specificity of her evidence made this my most engaging reading experience of the last few months. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a Slayer bio to finish.