American Believer

Open Source with Christopher Lydon

The novelist Marilynne Robinson has a nearly constitutional role in our heads, our culture by now. She’s the artist we trust to observe the damaged heart of America, and to tell us what we’re going through. I’ve been re-reading her early fiction, particularly Housekeeping and Gilead from 20 years ago, and remembering her conversations with Barack Obama over the years, with tables turned from the start. It was never the usual writer profiling a president or a candidate. He was the inquiring politician asking her about Iowa and the country, about the image of God in other people, the presumption of goodness in others that underlies cooperation and democracy.

Last winter she said that if she and Citizen Obama were still writing letters back and forth, she’d begin by asking him to “Say something to cheer me up . . . Say it again: that the people ultimately are wise . . . are good.” How would that conversation go today?