Marilynne Robinson's vision for democracy

In the summer of 2016, the New York Review of Books published a conversation between Marilynne Robinson and President Barack Obama. The details of their conversation were less memorable than the spectacle of a president unspooling long, substantive thoughts with a prominent novelist.

Obama and Robinson are linked by affinity, mutual admiration, and coincidence. Robinson’s epistolary novel Gilead launched her back into the heights of American letters in the same month Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate following a masterful oratorical display at the Democratic convention. Two more novels set in the fictional Gilead and three essay collections—which sometimes commented assertively on current events—followed during the years Obama served in public office. He cited her in speeches and awarded her the National Humanities Medal. She wrote about her vast admiration for him. It was not hard to see them working on congruent democratic projects—his on the large but tightly constrained stage of national politics, hers on the smaller but infinitely open theater of the page and its reader.

Yet Alan Jacobs, in a thoughtful and widely read essay on the decline of Christian intellectuals in America, took Robinson to task for her conversation with Obama, finding her chat with Obama overly genial. “It may be poor form to use a conversation with a friend in order to speak truth to power, but I for one would have appreciated a dose of Cornel West–like poor form,” Jacobs wrote. He cited Obama’s failure to close Guantánamo Bay as one topic she might have raised (Harpers, “The Watchmen,” September 2016). “Robinson may well be the finest living American novelist, and at her best a brilliant essayist,” Jacobs went on, “but whatever her religious beliefs, her culture seems to be fully that of the liberal secular world.”