The three most recent, interrelated novels—Gilead, Home, and Lila, which was released last month—are exquisitely imagined human stories that work out many of the theological themes to which Robinson’s writing returns again and again. It is not quite accurate to describe them as “engag[ing] deeply with the thornier aspects of Calvinist theology,” given that Robinson’s characters—themselves devout Calvinists—rue the “crude” use to which certain doctrines (e.g. predestination) have been put. It would be truer to say that Robinson’s novels engage deeply with a theology of amazing grace.

Given the dramatic and oft-noted rise of the religious “nones,” Marilynne Robinson’s sterling reputation and popularity as a novelist and essayist—not merely among Christians, but among critics and readers of every faith and no faith—is something of a surprise. Robinson’s rigorous intellect is wedded to a profound appreciation of the human soul; her creative vision takes shape in relation to her Christian faith.

“I have read and loved a lot of literature about religion and religious experience – Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Flannery O’Connor, the Bible,” Mark O’Connell writes in The New Yorker, “but it’s only with Robinson that I have actually felt what it must be like to live with a sense of the divine.”

Writing for The New York Times recently, Gregory Cowlesremarked that it is “both heartening and a little weird” that Robinson’s recently released novel, Lila, had made the hardcover fiction bestseller list, her fourth to earn the honor. For Cowles, Robinson’s popularity is:

heartening because Robinson’s sentences are so polished and faceted and clear they could bend light; weird because most of her books engage deeply with the thornier aspects of Calvinist theology.

Despite her success, considerations of marketability emphatically do not drive Robinson’s writing. Indeed, at a reading at the Free Library of Philadelphia recently, Robinson remarked that she doesn’t formulate her writing motivations at all: “I don’t decide to write something; I find that my mind is writing it already.”

Of her first novel, Housekeeping (1980), which won the prestigious PEN/Hemingway award for first fiction, Robinson said that she sincerely regarded it as unpublishable; only at the prompting of a friend did she submit the manuscript to an agent. Of her second, Gilead, she remarked that nothing in its description—”a minister dying in Iowa in 1956 […who] spend[s] a certain amount of time on theological reflections”—sounds particularly marketable. Nonetheless, as she commented in Philadelphia, one day she simply found thatGilead‘s narrator, John Ames, was “whispering in [her] ear.”

Much is made of the 24-year gap between Robinson’s first novel and her second, which garnered not only critical acclaim and popular appeal, but also the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. But it’s a mistake to regard those years as unfruitful; for Robinson, that time was one of significant shifts in her thinking. After a trip to England, where she reported — and later wrote a nonfiction book, Mother Country — on the dangerous, profit-motivated plutonium disposal at the Sellafield plant, she felt compelled to reassess all that she thought she knew, and undertook an effort at self re-education.

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