Thousand Fibers

A few months ago, I read Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, a slowly paced character meditation through the voice of an aging minister. The book won a Pulitzer, which seemed promising, but I never quite fell into it or truly understood it. This profile of the author helps me understand... why I was so far out of touch with the novel.

Sure enough, here are the multivolume "Commentaries" of the great 16th-century Protestant theologian, whom Robinson considers one of the most falsely caricatured figures in history. Here are the two volumes of Calvin's "Institutes of the Christian Religion," without which she thinks you can't understand Herman Melville. Surrounding these are a multitude of other theological and educational works, few less than a century old.
...
As a constant reader growing up in Idaho in the 1940s and '50s, she was obsessed with, among other things, the works of Edgar Allan Poe. "You can't believe how much Poe poetry I can recite to this day," she says now.
A demonstration is requested. She responds with the opening lines of "Alone":

From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from the common spring.

Poe wrote these lines in 1830. But they could just as easily have been written by Marilynne Robinson in 2008.

From "At 'Home' With the Past" in The Washington Post

Another profile in The Times of London calls her the world's best writer of prose...