Marilynne Robinson writes well about spirituality, because she writes well about despair. Like the political, the spiritual seems tricky in fiction: polemics can sneak in.
But in Housekeeping, the spiritual passages are so entangled with the narrator, so rooted in the book’s world, so drenched with the book’s story, that they are absolutely compelling. To quote the book’s explicitly spiritual sentences–“It seemed to me that what perished need not also be lost” –is to isolate those sentences from the book’s implicit spiritual momentum.
Ultimately, I think politics and spirituality are thoughts in essays but feelings in fiction. Does that make any sense?
Housekeeping—so far, p. 162—is not about proving God. It is about craving God and, as Robinson writes, “To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow.”
