13 October, 2014

spouse of the holy - bookforum.com / current issue

spouse of the holy - bookforum.com / current issue: Faced with this estrangement, Robinson’s characters digress, in search of meaning and moments of connection, seeking however they can “to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.” Love is one reply to this predicament—a senseless quantity, “the eternal breaking in on the temporal,” a parable of “an embracing, incomprehensible reality.” The same might be said of the novel, an attempt to bridge, through loving effort, the unbridgeable. Robinson’s genius is for making indistinguishable the highest ends of faith and fiction, evoking in her characters and her readers the paradox by which an individual, enlarged by the grace of God, or art, acquires selfhood in acquiring a sense of the world beyond the self—the sublime apprehension that other people exist.