Home Is Where The Hurt Is

摘要

It's a hard thing to admit to being bored by Marilynne Robinson. She's a tremendous power in American fiction. She's the author of Housekeeping, a transcendently weird, overpoweringly sad book that was a finalist for the Pulitzer in 1982, and Gilead, which won it in 2005, almost a quarter-century later. When Robinson writes-as she does in her new novel, Home (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 325 pages)-that the white hair of a sleeping old man is "like harmless aspiration, like a mist given off by the endless work of dreaming," her similes are so precise and so beautiful that one knows one should not be bored. In her essays, Robinson is a ferocious advocate of the life of the mind and the spirit, and one suspects that if one possessed the virtues she celebrates, probably justly, one would not be bored by Home. And yet one is.