Marilynne Robinson's beautiful, cranky nonfiction

“I am too old to mince words,” Marilynne Robinson warns us in the preface to her fifth collection of essays. She wrote them between the spring of 2015 and the spring of 2017, mostly in response to lecture invitations from Ameri­can universities, and they speak frankly, at times polemically, to Robin­son’s sense of the current American historical and political moment.

The “we” in her title is primarily her fellow citizens, beneficiaries of American democratic traditions and their embodiment in religious, political, and educational institutions. “Democracy,” she acknowledges, “is my aesthetics and more or less my religion.” What gives these essays an often wistful and sometimes combative tone is Robinson’s sense that this democratic heritage is under threat.

The essays were written during a sea change in American politics—the end of Barack Obama’s presidency and the beginning of Donald Trump’s—and they leave no doubt about Robinson’s political leanings. “A Proof, a Test, an Instruc­tion” is a lyrical ode to Obama written a month after Trump’s election, while “Slander” is a mournful and enraged homily about her mother’s end-of-life addiction to Fox News.