| Saturday, April 28, 2007 5:37PM | | | | Per Petterson and Marilyn Robinson | Posted By: Mindy Aloff
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| Tags: Marilynee Robinson, Per Petterson, fiction, voice, family,
research, style | Marilynne Robinson (Housekeeping, Gilead) must be on everyone’s top 10 list of living American novelists, as well as on a top 10 list of teachers of fiction (Iowa). I’m ashamed to say that I’ve never read anything by either her or her companion panelist here, the Norwegian novelist Per Petterson (Out Stealing Horses), a failing that I intend to remedy.
So the following brief report is about the event, alone—a panel discussion on the voice in fiction, inspiration, attitude toward characters, and principal themes, which was briskly and very knowledgeably moderated by Radhika Jones, managing editor of The Paris Review.
Having run over to Lincoln Center from an event across town, I was greeted at the door of the Walter Reade by an usher who asked if I was there for “the Marilynne Robinson” event. And that pretty much sums up my overall response to it. Since both writers read from their works a bit, one couldn’t help hearing the vast difference between their respective dictions and frames of reference, and Mr. Petterson—though he seemed a gentleman of wit, humility, and, in his own novelistic world, assurance—could not possibly compete in a prose snapshot-to-snapshot with Dr. Robinson, who seems to have channeled the elements of style and Biblical diction in Melville, Dickinson, Thoreau, and other nineteenth-century American writers whom she identified several times as her touchstones of prose writing and whose extensive research on subjects outside herself provide her with a huge intellectual platform from which to launch her storytelling. (I believe it was Ms Jones who pointed out that the participants hadn’t even met one another until 20 minutes before the panel began.) As a latecomer, I also wasn’t sure if Mr. Petterson’s work was an English translation from the Norwegian; in the event, the ideas in his fiction procede at a markedly slower pace than the intellectual and metaphorical fireworks of Dr. Robinson’s speech and writing, and, in a 10-minute comparison, his style sounded threadbare. This isn’t to say that it is threadbare; there were laconic subtleties of an emotional kind in the way his characters interacted—only that no evaluation of it can be made without a longer sampling.
Dr. Robinson spoke with the voice of a visionary. She explained that she doesn’t choose the identity of her narrators: instead, they claim her inexplicably. She remarked on the metaphors of Melville and Thoreau as being “a kind of transubstantiation,” and, as she continued to speak, her verbal expression became so complex and layered and, in places, nearly ecstatic that it sounded to me as if she is, indeed, one of those American originals for whom there is little distinction between the practical and the interior life. This deep and fluid comingling of the public and the private cannot possibly obtain for the author all the time, especially one associated with an academic program where forms must be filed and other housekeeping tasks completed, but in the context of the conversation, Ms Jones drew it from her. And the originality was more than shocking: it was a joy.
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