Reading Genesis
A writer’s book, not a scholar’s; it has no footnotes. Its power lies in the particular reading it gives us of one of the world’s foundational texts ... There are some arguable points. Robinson’s depiction of law as a framework of instruction that is up to us to keep or break is extremely modern and individualistic, and doesn’t square with the enforced tribal behavior of the Mosaic code ... These are the idiosyncratic incidentals of a genuinely idiosyncratic reading. Against them, there is the tough-minded continual splendor of Robinson’s attention to Genesis’ figures in the landscape.
Read Full Review >>
This is the stuff of sermons—the kind I’d willingly sit through. But Robinson is also up to something that should interest her secular readers. She’s working out a poetics. In her deft hands, Genesis becomes a precursor to the novel—the domestic novel, as it happens, which is the kind she writes. Perhaps I’m making her sound self-glorifying. She’s not ... The genius of Reading Genesis lies in its collapse of the space between the holy and the mundane, the metaphysical and the physical.
Read Full Review >>
On the face of it, Robinson should be an ideal reader of Genesis ... One wants a novelist of Robinson’s talent to cast her eye over these crooked tales, these stories bent into their shapes by human want and willfulness ... At the same time, a novelist who appears to trust in divine intervention the way you or I might trust in a train timetable, who reads these verses as human episodes written by humans who were themselves authored by God, makes for an intriguingly pious commentator ... Reading Genesis from inside rather than outside these theological presumptions seems an interesting experiment: it would involve properly crediting both the humanity and the divinity of these strange tales. At her best, Robinson is masterly at this hybrid task ... Robinson often makes an eloquent case for the specialness of this new kind of God and the unusual interest, solicitude, and high-handed love he displays to his creations. But perils attend her kind of piety. You soon become aware of Robinson skewing everything in favor of this strange God ... But at some point the shadow text extends its ghostly hand, and you realize that Robinson is not merely paraphrasing the text’s sacred premises; she is sermonizing about an actual God and his actual Providence. She is not only speaking of God but for God.
Read Full Review >>
