This is a difficult review to write. I think very highly of Marilynne Robinson's work, and I would hate it if my wooden pedantries scared away even one prospective reader. As described here, the topics discussed in this book may seem dry, or irrelevant to your concerns, or unworthy of further discussion. In fact, "The Death of Adam" is not dry, but exhilarating; not irrelevant, but essential; and it represents a tradition of intelligent, fair-minded discourse that has not been an ideal, let alone a standard, in the 20th century.
It's informative, certainly--not as a collection of facts to be memorized, but as a sort of web of active information, the strands of which you can follow as far as you like. The writing is dazzling, with all the power of a language fully employed by a fully attending author. Her humor is devastating; better still, she uses it therapeutically, as a surgeon uses a scalpel. At its best, "The Death of Adam" makes one aspire to be as curious, thoughtful, compassionate, and honest as its author.
Chief among her concerns is that we treat the past as little more than a scapegoat for our era's problems. Important subjects on which people once failed, honestly, to reach agreement, we now fail even to recognize as important; and ideas of the past are contemptible except where they anticipate ideas of the present. It takes a bit of mental effort to remember that this attitude is not common to all times and places; it takes even more effort to realize what we're in danger of becoming by refusing to question its necessity. One of Ms. Robinson's most radical correctives is "to read major writers, and establish within rough limits what they did and did not say." A reasonable request, and yet...
Here I must bring up an earlier reviewer's remarks. Certainly, everyone should be able to differentiate between fair-minded criticism, and snarls of half-bright belligerence; still, I can't let the remarks of "a reader"--undeserved honorific!--from Washington DC go unchallenged. We have here essays on subjects ranging from neo-Darwinism to Puritanism to market economics. Two fascinating pieces trace the influence of Marguerite de Navarre on John Calvin, another demonstrates the anti-slavery subtext of the McGuffey readers, and yet another discusses the life and writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran theologian who was executed by the Nazis. You'll notice, I hope, that "a reader" has nothing to say about Ms. Robinson's treatment of these subjects, offers no refutation of any of her statements, and suggests no other writer from whom the interested reader might seek better information. Instead, in his or her own inimitable style, "a reader" slaps her wrist for writing "poor prose." Personally, I tremble at daring even to praise so exquisite a prose writer as Ms. Robinson; one has to do it with words, after all!
I am not an academic, thank God, but I didn't find a single word she uses to be obscure. (And had I run into a word I didn't know, I would've appreciated the opportunity to look it up and find out what it meant. I don't think I'm alone in feeling that learning new things is an agreeable fringe benefit of reading books.) If her prose is poor, it's certainly no worse than that of Emerson, Chesterton, Sir Thomas Browne, Dickens, or Tolstoy, which is more than good enough for me.
Ms. Robinson obviously has no desire to baffle anybody; the entire point of this book is to affirm what we owe to ourselves and each other as civilized beings--foremost, perhaps, being the willingness to communicate honestly and in good faith.
But we are to put all this and more aside, so that we may consign Ms. Robinson to an arguably mythical class of environmentalist fanatics. This is a computer-like simulacrum of thought--if "expression of concern," then "diagnosis of hysteria." It's no wonder that so many people believe computers can be programmed to think. The chapter on "Wilderness" comprises barely ten pages out of 254; its historical claims are matters of public record, all perfectly verifiable. If any of its predictions are wrong, I would love to see the evidence (as, I'm sure, would Ms. Robinson). Far from focusing on "the plight of the koala," she mentions the animal once, as an example of how we concentrate on "environmental issues that photograph well."
Marilynne Robinson is also the author of the harrowing (and highly recommended) "Mother Country," the information in which could jaundice the sunniest of souls. And yet, despite having an unexcelled understanding of human cruelty and the drab postulates it thrives on, she's still engaged with the world--still passionate about the human capacity for feeling, knowing, and communicating things of transcendent value. If that's hysteria, I hope it's contagious!
To those who are already familiar with "Death of Adam," I heartily recommend a somewhat kindred book, also available from Amazon: Alan Garner's "The Voice That Thunders."
