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It's all been told before. But that's the point. The story's old. All stories are. We do not read for that. We read to know just what we are to make of the stories we already know. We read to ask how are we, knowing what we know, expected to get out of bed tomorrow morning. To stay alive till then. Some days to flourish.
Robinson can be a gentle writer, soothing even, but always in the service of an enterprise that in another hand might have us in the stock and pillory. She's come to talk of things that matter, let us not pretend. Mercy, grace. Truth and wisdom. And sorrow for our sin. Sin, perhaps defined as our intention to believe our substitutes will see us through. And yet, and yet, I show you a better way. In this writer's hands, good people can be good with fear of neither masquerade nor tedium. Her saints are kind as they are intelligent. A dying father says his anticipation of the prayers of gratitude and rejoicing he would pray on the day his prodigal came home gave him joy for twenty years. Robinson's men—yes, men—refuse ironic immolation with a soft-spoken, pleasing ease. (I want to use the word old-fashioned, though I know full well that goodness never was in vogue. True courtesy, hard to abide.) And here, rogues and villains practice righteousness, refuse to lie. Robinson writes of a redemption that redeems our dogged compromise, our tawdry imitations.
There's no fit way to encapsulate the beauty of Robinson's language, the lyricism born and bred in earnestness, the brilliance of her understanding. Choppy quotes are clunky. Not that that will stop my trying.
Robinson would have us know things. Have us know forgiveness precedes not follows understanding. Forgive, she says, and "you will be ready to understand, and that is the posture of grace." She paints with tiny brush strokes, showing "Sympathy [that] would corrupt something wonderful, which secrecy and a kind of shame kept safe." She tells us of a God who "lets us wander so we will know what it means to come home."
She'd have us laugh out loud, with the preacher's treating salvation as if it were "a problem that had been sorted out between the Druids and the centurions at about the time of Hadrian," adding that "The doctrine of total depravity had served him well." And later, she has his children studying "deracination … angst and anomie," done "with the earnest suspension of doubt that afflicts the highly educable."
Robinson knows and does not fear to tell us what a thing a family can be, with the burden of "their endless, relentless loyalty." The parents with the hope their son would not be lost to them. "The one hope I couldn't put aside." says the father who doesn't ask for much, only everything, only wanting every day forever "the childish happiness they'd offered to their father's hopes."
This writer knows old age. The joke seeming to be that once very young, now very old, having been the same day after day, people at the end are somehow so utterly changed. Looking back on being young, the old man says, "it's like remembering that I used to be the sun and the wind." Now, his hair "brushed into a soft white cloud, like harmless aspiration, like a mist given off by the endless work of dreaming," he sleeps on. And finally he knows something like peacefulness with the "extinction of that last hope, like a perfect humility undistracted by the possible." And always memory. Standing in the sunlight "the wind hushing in the dusty lilacs of their childhood, laundry swaying on the lines where school clothes used to hang."
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