Robinson’s spare, luminous novels – Housekeeping (1980), Gilead (2004), Home (2008), and Lila (2014) – saw her justly heralded in literary circles and beyond. Their subject matter – the plain, profound lives of people like herself who live in the vast centre of the United States – struck a chord that was quiet but resonant. As a professor of English and creative writing at the renowned Iowa Writers’  Workshop, and as a guest lecturer at universities at home and abroad, and occasional preacher in churches and cathedrals, she has earned such a high reputation for her stringent and timely cultural commentary that it was perhaps inevitable that Barack Obama, while still president, should seek to engage her in public conversations in Iowa in 2015 (subsequently published in The Givenness of Things: Essays [2015]).

Robinson is now famous internationally and unrepentantly unfashionable. In a central essay (‘Our Public Conversation: How America Talks About Itself’) in this latest volume, she quotes from an overview she found on the internet:

It said that that if someone were bioengineered to personify unhipness, the result would be Marilynne Robinson. The writer listed the qualities that have earned me this distinction – I am in my seventies, I was born in Idaho, I live in Iowa, I teach in a public university, and I am a self-professed Calvinist.

Characteristically, she both savours the ‘unhipness’, and apologises for none of its constituent ‘qualities’: ‘Ah, well. I will only grow older, I am happy in Iowa, my religion is my religion.’ But she agrees with her critic that readers of her ‘will find thinking that is very unlike their own’. But then, ‘The article did make me think, though, how inclined Americans are to find their way to some sheltering consensus that will tell them what to wear, what to eat, what to read, how to vote, what to think.’

Robinson’s critique of that ‘sheltering consensus’ is the core of these essays. She is aware of the potential paradox: ‘I know it is conventional to say we Americans are radically divided, polarized. But this is not more true than its opposite – in essential ways we share false assumptions and flawed conclusions that are never effectively examined because they are indeed shared.’

The essays anatomise a formidable list of  ‘false and flawed conclusions’, from the assumption that America invented capitalism, to blinkered conceptions of Puritanism and its legacy (American higher education!), adherence to Marxism and social Darwinism (‘two tellers of one tale’), to manipulation of the meaning of  ‘élite’, and the consequences of conforming to a belief in the genetic inevitability of human selfishness. ‘We have surrendered thought to ideology,’ she writes. Self-interested competitiveness has become accepted as the primary American motivation. But ‘Where in all this is wisdom, courage, generosity, personal dignity?’

There is a cadence of exasperation in Robinson’s rhetoric, and a disgust with the theoretical dance of America’s contemporary left and right: ‘Between them we circle in a maelstrom of utter fatuousness. I say this because I am too old to mince words.’ As a lifelong educator, she has seen a radical shift in American aspiration: ‘We have, in our supposed opposition, gone a long way toward making class real – that is, toward cheating people of opportunity. Historically, education has been the avenue by which Americans have had access to the range of possibilities that suit their gifts. We have put higher education further out of reach …’

Marilynne Robinson (Flickr)

Robinson taught for years in Iowa (she is now professor emeritus) and knows the value of the opportunity her public institution offered. She has seen her students flourish there. When she laments the increasing social and economic stratification that will exclude future students from similar opportunity, she is echoing a current American anxiety. But what distinguishes her, amid the general clamour of grievance and blame, is clarity and independence of mind, a formidable work ethic evident in her depth of scholarship, and a commitment to her country that transcends patriotism. Robinson has a clear, proud, and well instantiated understanding of what has been ‘great’ about America. She will not stand by and see ‘a betrayal of our magnificent minds and of all the splendid resources our culture has prepared for their use’.

Hence, these fifteen essays in What Are We Doing Here?, each of them worthy of serious contemplation. Writers will find her account of the way she constructs characters intriguing, and perhaps be gratified, as I was, by Robinson’s natural progression to a discussion of aesthetics, including a resurrection of that neglected word, beauty. ‘Beauty disciplines,’ she writes, and then proceeds to explain – convincingly – what she means. Historians and theologians (or general readers like me, content to follow the movements of Robinson’s mind) will discover much to ponder, sometimes to disagree with, in her reflections on American history, in her conception of the sacred, the human, the divine, freedom of conscience, and the corrosive effect of fear when used as a political weapon. Robinson is as well read in science and in modern physics as she is in theology, so her essays are never reductionist defences of religion against science. Rather, they are assertions of a complexity in the universe and in humankind that we all ignore at our intellectual peril.

Don’t be put off by the philosophical density of Robinson’s essays: they reward patient attention. But for bite, turn to the concluding piece. Its title, ‘Slander’, conjures a malevolent allegorical figure striding across the American stage, sowing discord – not far from the present truth. It is a poignantly personal essay: Robinson’s mother, late in life, became a consumer of Fox news, convinced that her ‘liberal’ daughter was one of those who had ruined America and would go to hell for it. The tone of the essay is dark, and the daughter’s sadness manifest. But the writer is adamant: ‘If we are to continue as a democracy, we must find a way to stabilise the language and temper of our debates and disputes.’ Amen to that.