Taking a break from reading Andrea Seigel's over-rated Like the Red Panda this morning, I ran across an excellent piece in the New York Times Magazine about Marilynne Robinson, who immortalized the obsessive inability to throw out glass jars in Housekeeping (1980), and whose long-awaited second novel looks like it will turn out to have been well worth the wait:

Like ''Housekeeping,'' ''Gilead'' is a lyrical evocation of existential solitude. But it is also a provocatively sympathetic account of the abolitionist movement and of John Brown -- whose attack on Harpers Ferry helped bring about the Civil War. In Robinson's mind, American progressives have lost the ability to ''take hold'' of an issue to mobilize change the way that radical reformers once did. And so ''Gilead'' differs from ''Housekeeping'' in one crucial way: it is an explicit corrective to what Robinson calls ''cultural amnesia.'' The explicitness of this ambition makes Robinson an anomaly in a literary landscape still more given to postmodern pontification than to old-fashioned political arguments.

In a sense, Robinson is a kind of contemporary George Eliot: socially engaged, preoccupied with the environment and the moral progress of man (especially as catalyzed through art) and preoccupied with the legacy of John Calvin (a misunderstood humanist, by Robinson's lights). Robinson, who has no television and doesn't drive, offered a scathing indictment of contemporary America's materialism and frivolity in her essay collection ''The Death of Adam''; all told, the book offered an almost anachronistically stern view of the moral failings of humankind. The curious part, then, is the degree to which readers of all persuasions find Robinson's strenuous vision a welcoming -- and welcome -- one.

Until a few years ago, Robinson was actually trying to write a different novel: a darkly comedic story of a woman ''abraded'' by her experience of the world. She worried, though, that she was stuck in an isolated female voice like the one in ''Housekeeping''; the novel didn't seem to come together. One day, she composed a piece of a poem by one of the book's ancillary characters, an elderly preacher. ''All of a sudden, this character emerged that had a voice and presence and authority that swept everything else I'd been doing away,'' she said. After this, she wrote ''Gilead'' swiftly, in two years or so. She told Conroy that it was as if she were sitting on the narrator's lap as he whispered the story to her.

At first glance, ''Gilead'' may seem eccentrically conceived: set in 1956, it weaves together an intimate family story and a century's worth of political events in the Middle West, sprawling from Kansas to Iowa and back. The narrator is John Ames, a 77-year-old preacher in Iowa who, facing death, has decided to make an account of his life for his young son (the unexpected gift of a late marriage to a much younger woman). Much of the novel is a reflection -- albeit an oblique one -- on the Kansas abolitionist movement and the years leading up to the Civil War, as experienced by Ames's grandfather, a spirited abolitionist and Civil War chaplain, and Ames's father, an ardent pacifist, whose ideologies set them at loggerheads. John Brown plays only a cameo role: the young Ames helps shelter him on the way home from a murderous raid. But the questionable merits of violent social activism cast a long shadow over the book.

I usually wait for the paperback, but I may have to make an exception this time.

Apropos of absolutely nothing, but will someone tell me how to pronounce the last name of Annie Proulx?

I say "Prue"! No reason to believe this is correct, though.

Erin, I am glad you've used the word overrated to describe Seigel's novel (note spelling of her last name, though--sorry, I have the soul of a copy-editor...). I had it from the library after hearing astoundingly good things about it online and elsewhere. I basically ended up reading just the first 50 pages and the last 20 or so. It wasn't that it was so bad, just that it seemed to me a pretty ordinary novel written by a talented young person! Does this sound awfully condescending? The coverage really made it out to be a work of complete genius. I will look out for her subsequent books, since I don't think you can blame the over-hype on the author herself & she may well write good stuff to come, but I really found it virtually unreadable!

I worry about some of the generalizations in this post, both in the quotations from the NYT and in Erin's commentary.

First off, what exactly is this "women's literature" that is exhuasted and strained? Ali's *Brick Lane* is nothing if not a throwback to traditional women's writing, and as conservative a critic as James Wood praised it. Even Robinson's comment is telling. The isolated female voice of the earlier novel is supplanted by the older, religious, authoritative voice of the preacher. This speaks more to form than to anything else. An isolated female voice perhaps can't be stuffed into an epic, historical form. The danger, of course, is that this seemingly stereotypical authoritative male voice will, monologically, define her new novel. Form and character are mutually informing; perhaps Robinson needs to discover the form that will give depth to this isolated female voice. Angela Carter and Elfriede Jelinek -- among countless others -- certainly found such forms.

I'm also not sure that this genealogical mode of fiction is growing. It's been around for awhile and has never really died out. Wallace Stegner's *The Angle of Repose* is a much earlier, and classic, version of a sub-genre that extends back at least to Faulkner. It's basically the way "regional writers" do the historical novel. Anne Michael's *Fugitive Pieces* could be included -- Commonwealth and postcolonial writers have been doing the genealogical form for years.

Finally, while I love Robinson's *Housekeeping*, it seems amiss not to mention Russell Banks' *Cloudspitting* in relation to her new novel. But then again, it's convenient to forget about writers like Banks when a critic is making ill informed claims about "postmdern pontification" against old-fashioned poltical arguments. Our most important political writers -- Ishmael Reed, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Leslie Silko, Gerald Vizenor, etc. -- have been "postmodern" at one time or another. And Banks' revision of John Brown is a prime example of a recent old-fashioned lefty historical novel.

But then again, contemporary writing is far messier and more complex a matter than most reviewers want to acknowledge.

I must be missing something.

A 77-year-old in 1956 would have been born in 1879, and John Brown died in 1859. Thus, Ames could not have sheltered Brown (though his father or grandfather could have).