Idiosyncratic intellectuals

If you are looking for a terrific book that explains how four intellectuals could move from different kinds of idealism to uniquely American pragmatism, read this one by Louis Menand. Menand is a wonderful writer, and this book gave me a sense of how important Holmes, James, Pierce and Dewey were in America.

Even more grace...

I now believe that I can say with certainty that I have never read a fiction writer who understands and depicts grace better than Marilynne Robinson. I already thought that Gilead was an amazing achievement, and then she managed the retell that story, in some ways even more powerfully, in Home. To boil it down, grace is loving people for who they are no matter how difficult or costly it is, believing for the best, even hoping for it, but not rejecting the person when the best is not forthcoming. We can all know that definition, but to tell a beautiful and believable story about it is another thing.

Here's another way to put it: Robinson understands that it was Jesus who told one of the greatest stories ever told: the parable of the prodigal son. Both of these novels expand on this most flexible of parables, interposing different older brothers, fathers, sons, and so on. In Home, the older brother is actually a younger sister, Glory, who learns to love the brother she had only detested. And the father here is Jack's father, Robert Boughton, the declining minister who has spent twenty years waiting for the return of his prodigal son. And he is slipping away, mentally, but has more moments of complete self possession than not, and when Glory says he should be kind to Jack (which he has been throughout), he says:

“’Kinder to him! I thanked God for him every day of his life, no matter how much grief, how much sorrow—and at the end of it all there is only more grief, more sorrow, and his life will go on that way, no help for it now. You see something beautiful in a child, and you almost live for it, you feel as though you would die for it, but it isn’t yours to keep or to protect. And if the child becomes a man who has no respect for himself, it’s just destroyed till you can hardly remember what it was—‘ He said, ‘It’s like watching a child die in your arms.’ He looked at Jack. ‘Which I have done.’” I do not know a single person who has a child who would not weep at these lines, coming when they do in the novel. And that’s where the skill of this novelist lies.

Can it be that I have now read two novels in which the climactic action is the most subtle and understated of all things, the blessing and calling “good” a man who has spent his whole life running from home? Yes. Wow.