Any piece of scientific or religious writing is also a work of mystery. Marilynne Robinson’s 2009 novel Home is no exception. Home isn’t a ghost story like Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw,” but her characters, the pious, Presbyterian Boughtons, are haunted by their immutable pasts. Home, like Robinson’s other works, which include a nonfiction book about “parascience,” is concerned with kindness, respect, and piety, but it doesn’t ignore the barriers we daily construct that hinder moral progress. In short, it doesn’t ignore the fact that home, how to make, inhabit, and heal it, is a mystery that may well be solution-less.

I started in on Robinson’s lauded novel after reading Rick Moody’s polarizing “memoir with digressions,” The Black Veil. (TBV boasts a blurb from off-the-grid postmodernist Thomas Pynchon, but also inspired Dale Peck’s unrelenting, which begins with the bold thesis “Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation. Moody’s writing is highly associative, bouncing back and forth between issues of politics, mental health, and the dually crumbling and regenerative self. Its title refers to the book’s central conceit: Moody spends much of The Black Veil traveling New England, researching his lineage, looking for any genealogical link between himself and “Handkerchief Moody,” the inspiration for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s highly-anthologized short-story “The Minister’s Black Veil.” In doing so, Moody uncovers his Puritanical and Calvinist roots. Stylistically, Robinson’s novel shares little with Moody’s work of self-examination. There is, however, a clause late in his memoir, placed inconspicuously mid-paragraph, in which Moody asserts that “language obfuscates as much as it reveals.” Robinson’s work exemplifies this radical truth. Like Hawthorne’s short-story, Home deals with concealment, i.e. mystery. Using metaphoric language, mastered after years of close readings of Transcendentalist texts by Emerson and Thoreau, Robinson draws attention to the hidden, dust-lined drawers of the soul, its nooks and its crannies, chinks at the edges. Moral sincerity takes pride of place over practical sincerity. Scenes of dialogue are handled deftly, each characters’ words riding a current of meaning not always clear to the conversationalists. 

Home, the place, the idea, is perhaps the greatest mystery shared by all readers. One of Kurt Vonnegut’s final books is titled “Man Without a Country,” but, more powerfully, he admitted in interviews to feeling like a man without a home. Home, for him, was Indianapolis, 1931, his ninth of eighty-four years. Home wasn’t simply a place, but a time. It didn’t – it couldn’t – exist without the grace-giving presence of his mother, father, siblings, friends, teachers. Robinson’s novel articulates well this phenomenon of figurative homelessness. This is a commendable accomplishment, considering her novel rarely leaves the Boughton homestead. Though Robinson’s prose is clean, and her characters deeply considerate, there’s an element of discomfort at play in Home. Aside from the Biblical allusions, the niceties of domesticity and religious curiosity or observance, Home, like The Black Veil, is a story about people struggling to be good fathers, sons, sisters, brothers, people.  

Home and The Black Veil are recommended reading for Emerson students, especially as syllabi are printed and books ordered. Whether you feel as though you’re leaving or returning home this September, Robinson and Moody have wisdom to share.  

(text by: John Francisconi)