Christianity and Literature

Vol. 61, No. 1 (Autumn 2011)

Native Speakers:
Identity, Grace, and Homecoming
Rowan Williams

An address delivered on the occasion of the Archbishop receiving

the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Conference on
Christianity and Literature.
Oh, it was the loneliness none of them could ever forget, that wry distance,
as if there were injury for him in the fact that all of them were native to
their life as he never could be. (Marilynne Robinson, Home, 249)
Marilynne Robinson's much-praised and much-discussed pair of novels,
Gilead and Home, deal, as she has herself said, with the unfinished business
of the parable of the Prodigal Son (see the interview in Christianity and
Literature 58:3, 2009, 487-88). After homecoming, what? And what does
homecoming actually mean? As the quotation with which I began suggests,
the notion of homecoming is a very ambivalent one when there is no
"home" to start with. The words represent what the prodigal's sister. Glory,
is thinking as she picks up the pieces after her brother Jack returns from an
episode of desperate alcoholic escape. She has had to become "resigned" to
forgiveness; as she reflects on why she cannot help but forgiveeven as she
contemplates withholding her mercy "for an hour or two"she recognizes
that it is partly because of the (lifelong?) sense of alienness that Jack carries
with him, as if he has always been at a distance from their ethos and speech,
even perhaps parodying these, unconsciously or not. He cannot but be an
ironist. And being an ironist means, in this context, never having a native
tongue. His father and his father's friend, his own godfather, John Ames,
cannot speak with him without suspecting that he is somehow subverting
their own habitual discourse; and he is cripplingly conscious of this and
frequently silenced by it.

CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE

Jack covered his face with his hands and laughed. "The Lord," he said, "is
veryinteresting."
"I know you don't mean any disrespect," his father said.
"I really don't know what I mean. I really don't."
"Well," the old man said, "I wish I could help you with that." {Home 157)
But of course he cannot. "I always seem to give offense," Jack says to
Ames at one point, and Ames, denying any offense, responds, "I do wish we
could speak moredirectly" (Gilead 169). Even when, in their last heavily
charged conversation, John Ames gives him his blessing as "beloved son and
brother and husband and father" {Gilead 241), Jack's reaction makes Ames
think he has "named everything I thought he no longer was," although this
is "the exact opposite" of what Ames means. Ames has been trying to name
what cannot be taken away from Jack's identity; but Jack cannot hear these
words in a native tongue. He cannot help receiving them as an ironist, and
thus receiving them as ironical, whether the irony is or is not intended. At
one point in Home, when Jack reads to his father, we are told that "there
was a kind of grace to anything [he] did with his whole attention, or when
he forgot irony for a while"; and this can still surprise his father {Gilead
146). Jack's irony is, we might say, the wrong kind of attention, an attention
to himself in the eyes of others rather than to the act or the word or the
relational reality itself. But his virtual paralysis in relationship reminds us
how very difficult attention is, and how little it is a matteras his father
thinksof being "wonderful when he wants to be" (ibid.).
In the great set-piece conversation about grace and predestination
recorded in both novels. Jack's serious theological enquiryare some people,
so to speak, born to sorrow and to foreignness and ultimately to hellis
heard uncomfortably by both Ames and his father, and their response is, as
he says, "cagey" {Gilead 151). They suspect him of quiet mockery, but the
truth is that he has no language for the question that will sound sincere
except to Ames' unconventional young wife, who is the only one able to give
him a reply that actually addresses him: "A person can change. Everything
can change" {Gilead 153). Afterwards, affectionately and reproachfully, she
says to her husband that "Maybe some people aren't so comfortable with
themselves" {Gilead 154)almost a paraphrase of Glory's thought that Jack
sees his family as "native to their life" in a way he is not and carinot be.
Yet Ames' wife. Lila, is capable herself of an impact not unlike that
which Jack has. When her husband first encounters her as a member of his
congregation, he feels "there was a seriousness about her that seemed almost

IDENTITY, GRACE, AND HOMECOMING

like a kind of anger. As though she might say, T came here from whatever
unspeakable distance and whatever unimaginable otherness just to oblige
your prayers. Now say something with a little meaning in it'" {Gilead 21).
She is no more a native than Jack is; yet, despite the strong sense she conveys
to Ames that his words from the pulpit are judged and found wanting, she
comes to inhabit her identity as Jack never does. Later in the same book,
as they sit together in desultory conversation, with Ames half-asleep. Jack
oflFers her a cigarette, and she declines on the grounds that "it just isn't
seemly in a preacher's wife"; and when Jack picks this up with a touch of
mockery, she replies, "I been seemly so long I'm almost beginning to like it"
(Gilead 199). She has, though with difficulty and over a significant period of
time, learned to pass as a native, yet without losing her critical liberty. Her
"unimaginable otherness" has not made a native tongue impossible for her.
Lila's irony is, we might say, a reconciled irony as opposed to Jack's
unreconciled irony. She retains the capacity to question the attitudes of those
who are too much at home with themselves or their world; and we must
assume that it is she who makes Ames able, after a painful conversation with
Jack, to acknowledge that the town of Cilead's surface decencies conceal a
systemic untruthfulness, a refusal to ask what is to be learned from crisis
or challenge: "we didn't ask the question, so the question was just taken
away from us" (Gilead 233-34). Its very existence depended on its role, in
what is now a remote and forgotten past, as a stopping stage on the route
to Kansas for escaping slaves and anti-slavery radicals, "in the heat of an
old urgency" (Gilead 234); but it has lost the capacity to ask what it is there
for. And because it has forgotten its history, and the question of its history
(a forgetfulness reflected in the half-buried memory of the burning of a
"negro" church, in Jack's father's unthinking racism and in Jack's knowledge
that he can never bring his African American wife to Gilead), we have to
ask what it now means to be "native" to a place like this. Lila's reconciled
irony does not mean that her ability to pass for native is a muffiing of the
question; on the contrary, she is able, as Jack generally is not, to give voice
to the possibility of change. She is able to speak, where Jack's paralysing
awareness of the oflence he may give leaves him silent.
What makes the diflference? Jack and his father clearly love each other,
yet are trapped in a painful inarticulacy toward each othermost poignantly
expressed when the old man says that Jack has never "had a name for me.
Not one you'd call me to my face," and Jack replies that he has never known
a name that didn't "seem wrong": "I didn't deserve to speak to you the way

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CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE

the others did" {Home 311). Jack cannot use the "script" of unselfconscious
family intimacy; but equally it is clear thatas his sister recognizesthis
script is presented to him both as an obligation and also as coriditional on
behaving appropriately. The language of "natural" family relationship, in
other words, is a text that cannot accommodate Jack's self-awareness, his
consciousness of himself as predestined to be a stranger, morally, culturally,
religiously, an "exile from the ordinary world" {Home 201): as h says to his
brother, "Sometimes it seems as though I'm in one universe and you're in
another" {Home 267). Glory, his sister, thinking of herself as '(resigned to
Jack's inaccessible strangeness" {Home 249) comes closest to seeing what the
problem is and knowing what is needed to resolve it, though her instinctive
sense of what Jack needs comes somehow too late to make a difference to
him, or to his awareness of himself.
Being resigned to strangeness means also that Glory is unresigned to
aspects of Gilead, aspects of the native and natural environment. Shewho
has herself been a prodigal of sortslooks at the town and all it means and
sees it as "dreaming out its curse of sameness, somnolence" {Home 281). Her
suddenly vivid perception of the curse of sameness is like the moment in
Gilead when Ames sees the town as having forgotten the possibi ity of truth.
Sameness cannot live with the question that history poses. The deceptively
timeless surface of Gilead's life, the illusion of a life in which everyone is a
native in an undifferentiated present, is a curse, is even, as Ames {Gilead
233) calls it, hellish. What Jack perceivesand hears as a kind of sentence
on himselfis the stipulation that homecoming is necessarily a return to
sameness, something that challenges both his own acute self-consciousness
of being a guilty outsider and his deliberate and costly alliance with otherness
by way of marrying into an African-American family (in which he is, of
course, also a guilty outsider). His own personal "doubleness," his constant
perception of himself from the other's standpoint, his acute ajwareness of
the offence of his language and perhaps his very existence, all this is subtly
fused in the narrative with the doubleness of the history of racial division.
the inbuilt possibility in the society and the cultural moment that Gilead
represents of more than one story being told. That is the possibility Gilead
has buried, for Jack as an individual as for the neighbor of another race.
Lila's story is different not because she finds Gilead any more
unproblematic than Jack does but because the "text" she has encountered is
not simply that of sameness. Her unsettling presence in Ames' congregation,
her "unimaginable otherness" (which Jack's "inaccessible strangeness"

IDENTITY, GRACE, AND HOMECOMING

11

echoes, surely deliberately), is recognized for what it is by the preacher,

an invitation to native speakers to grasp the possibility of other narratives
and discourses. She is able to find a "home" in Gilead, specifically in Ames'
world, because the text of Ames' preaching is able to live with the possibility
of its own failure or lack of truthfulness. It is not that Ames simply rejects
what he has had to say: Lila looks on as he baptizes two children, and he
senses himself asking a question back to her: "If you know a better way to
do this, I'd appreciate your telling me" {Gilead 21). He challenges her anger
without denying her seriousness, and this, we must assume, is part of what
builds not only her relationship with the Church but the possibility of her
eventual marriage to Ames.
Thus we are gently directed back to the question of what it is about
Ames' own preaching that makes this possible. Robinson gives us a few
hints, particularly when Ames muses wryly about the books he would like
to be found clutching in the event of a sudden death: "The ones I considered,
by the way, were Donne and Herbert and Barth's Fpistle to the Romans and
Volume II of Calvin's Institutes. Which is by no means to slight Volume
I" {Gilead 115). Karl Barth appears again at the end of the conversation
with Jack about predestination. Ames suggests that Jack might find Barth
helpful, and Jack's response is sardonic: does Ames recommend Barth to
tormented souls on the doorstep at midnight? Ames turns the remark
aside, but reflects to himself that "I don't recall ever recommending him to
any tormented soul except my own" {Gilead 153). It is the other side of the
coin from what his wife's loving rebuke about some people not being "so
comfortable with themselves" implies. Ames knows that he stands under
an alien judgment, and Barth's theology is one of his resources in learning
how to abide its scrutiny. As his recollection of his first encounters with Lila
is filled out furtherquite late in Gileadhe describes her presence and
his increasing obsession with her as "a foretaste of death," an experience in
which he is "snatched out of [his] character" {Gilead 205). "I simply could
not be honest with myself, and I couldn't deceive myself, either" {Gilead
203). But a Barthian theological perspective (certainly one informed
by Barth's Romans commentary) would suggest that precisely such a
simultaneous recognition of truth and falsehood is the expected condition
of the person who has faith. Faith is not the acknowledgement of a simple
consonance between what I think/believe and the truth of God, but the
twofold acknowledgement of the incalculable gulf between the truth of God
and my own subjectivity along with the inseparable commitment of God

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CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE

to the self-deceiving and helpless heart. "There is no other righteousness

save that of the man who sets himself under judgment, of the nian who is
terrified and hopes" says Barth early in his commentary {Romans 41); and
later, "the questionableness of our situation becomes a source of strength"
{Romans 156), and "Christ in us is ... both the place where we are judged
and the place where we are justified' {Romans 286).
For Ames to be found with Barth's Romans in his hand rnakes good
sense. And, without elaborating details at this point, the same holds of the
second book of the Institutes, which deals broadly with "The Knowledge
of God the Redeemer" including the whole question of what it means to
maintain the apparently shocking and counterintuitive claim that we are in
no way "free" to collaborate with the act of God. Redemption is to do with
the ways in which grace brings alive the life of Christ in the human self. An
independent human will as source of transformation and life would make
nonsense of anything like Ames' simultaneous recognition of^ truth and
deceit: Calvin's idea of faith and the restoration of the divine image is more
like a connection always already made, appearing now from this angle,
now from that, within the hopelessly unstable experience of the believing
soul; never a possession, yet always a presence because it is the presence
of an active savior. And hence the absurdity of suggesting that grace is a
fusion of divine and human initiative, as if the divine and the human were
agencies operating on the same level, potentially in competition] potentially
in harmony. If Calvin's perspective is the foundation of Ames' preaching,
we can see a little of why he isjustable to hear the question that Gilead
overall has lost. He may be broadly "comfortable," as Lila suggests, but it
is not a comfort that defends itself by refusing what is strange. His settled
faith is based on awareness of a strangeness at the very center of his identity:
Christ in him, in Barth's terms, is a given, a presence not dependent on
his own self-correspondence. There is in his identity something that is not
mere sameness. And so, if his starting position is an identity or ai:-homeness
that is aware of the alien action of grace in the background, Lila's journey
is a kind of reverse image as she moves away from sheer alienness toward
recognition or integration, toward her ironic but reconciled inhabiting of a
native language shared with her husband.
If the text of a native language is to be in some sense hospitable.
Robinson implies, it must be a text with a shadow or margin, conscious of
a strangeness that surrounds it and is not captured by it, a strangeness that
interprets it or at least offers the possibility of a meaning to be uncovered.

IDENTITY, GRACE, AND HOMECOMING

13

on the far side of questioning. And the paradoxical conclusion is that the
person who "inhabits" with integrity the place where they find themselves,
in such a way as to make it possible for others to inhabit it in peaceable
company with them is always the person who is aware of the possibility
of an alien yet recognizable judgment being passed, aware of the stranger
already sensed in the self's territory. To be, in the Augustinian phrase, a
question to oneself is what makes it possible to be oneself without anxiety
and so with the possibility of welcome for the other. Odd as it sounds to say
that the awareness of judgment is the solvent of anxiety, it makes sense in
the Barthian context of seeing judgment and justification in the same place.
Anxiety is bound to the impulse to justify oneself: judgment assures us that
this is out of our hands.
Thus the tragic standoff between Jack and his father in Robinson's
fiction reveals the constantly frustrated search for appropriate language,
language that can be "justified": Jack believes that he can never deserve to
call his father by the names that the other children can use, and his father
is listening (without ever quite knowing this is what he is doing) for a
language from Jack that is not challenging or offensive, a language with no
strangeness or questioning. In the event, they silence each other.
Jack shrugged. "I have to go now. I wanted to say goodbye." He went to his
father and held out his hand.
The old man drew his own hand into his lap and turned away. "Tired of
it!" he said.
Jack nodded. "Me too. Bone tired." {Home 317)
The inarticulate love finally expressed in Jack's parting kiss cannot
bridge the gulf created by exhaustion and non-communication. At the end
of Home, Glory remains, significantly, the mediator, who welcomes Jack's
(African American) wife and child, while still knowing that they cannot
yet be made welcome. Delia, Jack's wife, has "had to come into Gilead as if
it were a foreign and a hostile country" {Home 324); Jack's own frustrated
wish that he really lived in his father's house {Home 323) has foreshadowed
the rejection his family will experience. Glory, recalling Jack's wish to be
at home, tries to be hospitable, fully aware that she cannot truly welcome
the family because the discourse and imagery of where she liveswith her
father. Jack's fathercannot receive strangers. So she dreams of a future in
which her entire life will be, so to speak, justified when Jack's son returns
as an adult, recognizing the place as familiar, as his father's house; as if

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CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE

her entire life has been oriented toward making room for the stranger, the
question. And the young man will never know that he has completed the
circle of her hopes, or that "he has answered his father's prayers" (Home
325). Justification will be the gift of a guest who arrives trustingly It cannot
be guaranteed, planned for, scripted, but it can, it seems, be irituited as a
possibility. If Jack and Glory both know this, their narrative is not over,
despite the terribly poignant and apparently unreconciled parting between
Jack and his father.
Ames recognizes, however stumblingly, that justification is not to be
won, and so is able in some degree to sense it at work; Jack is left silenced by
the impossibility of winning it; Glory dreams of a moment in which it will
be briefly visible. For all of them, justification depends on the abandoning
of the hope of winning it. Ames grasps this in an eflective way. Glory has
an inkling of it. Jack, according to the author, prays for it un'knowingly.
even unhopefuUy His doubleness of vision and hearing, the paralyzing
awareness of how he seems to those he speaks to, incorporates something
absolutely vital to human integrity, the knowledge that I do not coincide
with myself, that who and what I am is significantly out of my control. The
problem is that this is unconnected with the "graceful" doubleriess that we
see in Ames and Lila, the knowledge that the stranger whose perception of
me I cannot control, isfinallynot my enemy or my competitor but the
generative source of myself. What I cannot master, the perspective I cannot
by definition attain or imagine (to borrow a thought of Simone Weil's), is
the presence that makes me alive and that also makes welcome possible
not only a being at home but a creation of home for the human other. And,
if we return to the question of irony, this is a perspective that allows an
ironizing of the ironic selfand therefore allows the attention that opens
to grace. Instead of the great gulf being fixed between the meanings I alone
understand and the appearances that others are content with, it is between
every meaning I or anyone else can master and the hidden purpose that
is at the center of my and everyone's lifewhich enjoins on us all the
attentiveness or expectancy Ames is able to bring to his encounters (sensing
"a kind of incandescence" in those who come to him (Gilead 44). "When
you encounter another person..., it is as if a question is being put to you.
So you must think. What is the Lord asking of me in this mornent, in this
situation?" (Gilead 124). And Robinson, in the interview already quoted,
points out that, against such a background, predestination is a liberating
doctrine in that it tells us that "God's view of us is essentially mysterious"

IDENTITY, GRACE, AND HOMECOMING

15

{Gilead 489); so far from imposing on us an unchanging character, it

declares that our future is radically unknowable to usso that change is
always imaginable, the answer to the question is always open from the side
of our awareness.
It isas Robinson does not fail to insist quietly in her evocation of
Gilead's racial defensivenessa political understanding as much as a
theological one. Identities are not sealed off from history. Gilead's radical
origins may decay into the defensive complacency that forgets the burning
of a black church and politely declines to be a home for Jack's family; old
Ames may work his way late in life toward a more painful awareness of the
"question" than his blameless ministry might have led us to expect, thanks
to Lila and Jack. The possibility of changed identity for an individual is no
more and no less extraordinary than what David Jones called "the turn
of a civilization." But to recognize this also highlights a deeply significant
cultural question, at the centre of Robinson's recent lectures on Absence of
Mind. "Whoever controls the definition of mind," she writes, "controls the
definition of humankind itself, and culture, and history" {Absence 32). How
we think about thinking is a profoundly political issue; and thinking, in this
context, includes all that we have so far been considering about questions
and native languages and identity. Absence of Mind attempts a diagnosis of
the contemporary near-obsession with defining mind in reductive terms,
"as a passive conduit of other purposes than those the mind ascribes to itself
{Absence 71). The effect of this, she argues, is to neutralize the questions
that the mind puts to itself about itself: the questions we put to ourselves
have the capacity, it seems, to change things (32 again), and so to silence
the questions is to assume that intentional change is literally unthinkable.
But, connecting this to earlier observations about irony, the effect of
silencing such questions is bound also to be a dismissal of the possibility of
irony. Irony places two registers of meaning in juxtaposition, two levels of
discourse, one apparent, the other hidden; the irony lies in their conscious
juxtaposition and the different senses in which they might be said to be
true. But while the reductive theses Robinson confronts appear to juxtapose
registers of discoursethe appearance of consciousness or intention and
the actual biological determination of all that is said or donethis is not in
fact the case. The underlying story is presented as unambiguously true and
the surface discourse as false. This is not irony, the generative play between
two registers, but a simple contrast between fact and error. The determining
materialist narrative cannot itself be "ironised." This account thus becomes

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CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE

one that denies any possibility of its own unsettlement; which is indeed a
serious political statement in that it cannot thus be other than a controlling
discourse, inimical to change. There is no tension between native and
other languages because in an important and troubling sense there are no
speakers: language itself becomes a form of determined behavior. It hardly
needs saying that the theorists targeted in Robinson's critique in Absence of
Mind would make the writing of fiction impossible, since fiction depends
substantially on various kinds of significant gap between what is said and
what is shown, between perspectives embodied in different sorts of speech.
It may be a matter of Dostoevskian "polyphony," the unresolved plurality
of voices allowed expression in the text; or, say, of the extraordinary double
vision of Dickens' Bleak House, with its alternation between not only narrators
but tenses, a "resolved" narrative in the past tense and a wholly unresolved
and unhealed authorial present tense; or of the unreliable narrators of late
twentieth century fiction, the shifting lights of Ian McEwan's Atonement, for
example; or of Robinson's careful delineation of the diverse ironies of Lila
and Jack. But none of these is thinkable if language is determined behavior.
None of the varieties of unpredictable narrative change work without a
picture of language as fundamentally behavior that invites and proposes
question.
Butto connect this discussion with the internal issue of how
Ames' language in the novels becomes open to the challenge of grace, of
transformation that enables someone to receive the radically strangethere
are fictions that not only work with irony but attempt to show how what
I earlier called "reconciled irony" enacts in its language a perception and
reception of grace. To identify Robinson's novels as examples of this is to say
that they voice a range of imagined personal perspectives within which it is
possible to see how a particular voice or particular "textual" construction
of the self allows a radically unknowable element in by both inhabiting
and relativizing its own place. It does not seek to be without place, without
home: that is thein fact unimaginableterminus of Jack's compulsive and
desperate ironising. Nor does it seek to dissolve the question addressed to the
self by fabricating an identity that collapses everything into sameness, into
formal reconciliation. The voice of grace is one in which the unknowable
judgment of God is constantly invoked; and by those mysterious processes
that Calvin (not least in Ames' beloved Book II of the Institutes) describes,
the freedom of God is, as it were, introduced into the human frame of
reference and radical change becomes imaginablenot because the human

IDENTITY, GRACE, AND HOMECOMING

17

self is free but because God is. We have made ourselves subject to necessity,
a necessity that is, paradoxically, "unnecessary," in tension with our nature
as God intended it (see Institutes ILiii.5); we are not compelled to evil, but
have always already chosen not to be free by our fantasy that we can live well
either by isolating our will from God or by imagining that we co-operate
with God as we might with another subject. Change occurs when we receive
the gift of a relation with God that makes us "natural" againat home with
God and ourselves precisely because we have given up the solitary struggle
to justify ourselves (e.g. Institutes II.v.15).
In the order of grace, the native speaker is not one who has never
questioned the language she or he speaks and has no awareness of what
other possibilities exist for speech; the native speaker is the one who can
inhabit language without anxiety, without constant defensive activity on the
borders of the territory, because of a knowledge that all truthful speech and
action is activated by what is and always remains unsaid, the hinterland of
God's unimaginable judgment. By such an alignment with an unseen and
unspoken judgment, the speaker is aligned with the divine liberty: not a
gift of independent human freedom but an openness to the alien margins
of human discourse out of which comes the raw possibility of change in
the direction of absolution and generosity. I do not coincide with myself;
this is a given, we might say, of all serious fiction, of the modern fictional
consciousness, preoccupied as it is with growth, self-delusion, recognition
of self and of difference. But for the Christian imagination, seeking words
and pictures for grace, that fictional consciousness has to be connected
with not only the mystery of change but what might be called the mystery
of absolution, the unpredictable arrival of the liberty both to absolve and
to receive absolution, without any denial of the chains of cause and effect.
Grace, the strange gift of becoming a native speaker of the language proper
to humankind, the language of being a creature, arrives at right angles to
planning and deserving. It rightly provokes both baffiement and gratitude;
and a fiction that is hospitable to the gospel will work out of both.
Faced with the sight of the illegitimate child of Jack's youthful affair
playing in the riverside sunlight with her mother, "Glory said, T do not
understand one thing in this world. Not one'" {Gilead 164). And Ames, at
the end of Gilead, significantly transfers the language of "prevenient grace"
to "prevenient courage"the bravery needed "to acknowledge that there is
more beauty than our eyes can bear," the courage which alone allows us to
be generous, hospitable. Bafflement and gratitude both require that courage;
Robinson's novels measure something of what such courage entails. It is

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CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE

both the courage to be judged, as Ames is by the alienness of ^^ila, and the
courage to inhabit, as Lila does, a speech and a style of living that you know
to be provisional to the point of near-absurdity because it does in spite of
everything make space for absolution. It is also the couragefor those who
are not quite touched by grace to the extent that Ames and his wife areto
imagine, as Glory does, a "justification" of all frustrated faithfulness and
endurance in terms of a homecoming that is equally personal and political.
Ultimately, that is what the Christian fiction is, an imagined justification,
achieved (artistically speaking) by trying to voice what it "sounds" like to
speak under an unknown judgment that is constrained by nothing but the
nature of a liberty for which "the one sufficient reason for the forgiveness of
debt is simply the existence of debt" {Gilead 161).
WORKS CITED
Barth, Karl. The Epistle to the Romans. Trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns. London: Oxford
UP, 1933.
Robinson, Marilynne. Absence of Mind. New Haven: Yale UP, 2010.
. Gilead. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004.
. Home. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.

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