Captain's Log: Home

Marilynne Robinson's ethereal exploration of the quotidian continues

There’s this meme, or I guess you would call it a recurring sentiment, that I see online all the time: why would you read literary fiction about sad people cheating on each other when you could read [insert genre here - sci-fi, fantasy, thriller, mystery, YA, etc] books instead? The sniveling underlying thesis is that literary fiction is a genre without incident, artful books where nothing much happens. Never mind the fact that genre hardly means anything anymore – most writers aren’t so parochial these days – and you can bore down to the general, and now all too-common, anti-elite complaint of the sentiment: those books are boring! Give me some action!

Marilynne Robinson’s Home fits that hyperbolic and demeaning description to a T: it’s a book about three people in a house in a small town, and most of it is just dialogue, the only sort of traditional narrative action taking place in the last quarter of the book. Everything else is just a series of days, of small discretions and revelations slowly meted out. And yet the book is not only not boring but somehow vividly tense and soothingly wondrous at the same time. Nevermind those sniveling masses justifying their slop; either you get it or you don’t. Nothing much happens in Home, and yet it is this granular attention to the everyday that makes it so good, so effecting.