HOME

OK, it took me forever, but it's fitting that I finished the new Marilynne Robinson novel, "Home," just before the holidays. One, because, not to sound corny, but a novel by Robinson is a gift; she's 65 and has written only three. Two, because this is the time of year when I most strongly feel the pull (or maybe, more precisely, the push) of family and home.

All of Robinson's novels are about family. "Housekeeping," her first, is about an eccentric household of women. "Gilead," her second, written 24 years later, is about an elderly minister and his young second family. "Home" is about a different elderly minister and two of his children, a dutiful daughter and a prodigal son.

I find them fascinating partly because they are not subjects that I personally would explore as a writer — family connections are not as interesting to me as chosen connections — and yet I see so much in her familial observations that makes me pause with wonder and recognition.

Like, in "Home," where a grown man says to his father: "I don't know why I am what I am. I'd have been like you if I could."

Ordinary words that are stunning in their context — the completely satisfying explanation of a mystery by a mystery.

Robinson's grasp of family, and the language she uses in its service, is equal to Shakespeare's. I was delighted to see a humble nod in "Home" to the beautiful lines from "King Lear": "we that are young/shall never see so much, nor live so long."

I had been thinking Robinson's old men were Lear-like, oddly minus the tragic flaws.

Her families live in small towns, where the domestic drama is heightened by the repetition of days, by the lack of distraction. The town described in "Housekeeping" could be all of them: "Fingerbone was never an impressive town. It was chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere."

All of her novels, the latter two explicitly, are about religion, about which she writes with a complexity — and simplicity — reminiscent of the Bible itself. I was always a big believer in the beauty, if not the literal truth, of the Christ story, but I never comprehended the poignancy of Christianity until I read "Gilead." I was familiar with the notion of "ecstasy," the visceral, passionate grasp of Christ, so prevalent in Western, Catholic art, but it was Robinson's homey Protestant tale set in Iowa that made me truly understand the awe — and, in a way, the irrelevance of literal truth. As the narrator of "Gilead" says, "It seems to me that when something really ought to be true then it has a very powerful truth."

Robinson's mastery of story-telling seems one-and-the-same with her spiritual understanding. In "Home," she describes a minister's work as "parsing the broken heart of humankind." But that's the work of a writer, too.

"Home" was the most difficult for me. It is intensely quiet and repetitive, and I didn't have the biblical knowledge to truly appreciate the prodigal son story. The breathtaking beauty of "Gilead's" language becomes more subdued and less elegiac here. We don't have the deeply affecting intimacy of the second-person narrator. At times I'd go for days without picking up "Home," and still I feel it as something to be reckoned with. I don't fully understand the meaning of this book now, but I have this strange faith that I will — like something will happen to me some day and I'll completely, suddenly understand this book.

Robinson has a character in "Home" who's a former teacher. She thinks back on her classroom days and her students:

Why do we have to read poetry? Why "Il Penseroso"? Read it and you'll know why. If you still don't know, read it again. And again. Some of them took the things she said to heart, as she had done once when they were said to her. She was helping them assume their humanity.

Which is exactly what Robinson does for us.

THE PIE

Sometime in the early '90s, when Rick was still living here, he brought back a summer treat from his mom's house: a lemon cream pie.

When he pulled it from the fridge — after some complicated dinner we had spent hours making and that I no longer recall — I remember thinking how sweet it was for a mom to send her boy off with a whole pie, but I didn't have any expectations beyond an ordinary mom-baked pie. I may even have thought, with the snobbishness peculiar to 20-somethings, it wasn't a fitting end to the elaborate meal we just had.

Then he uncovered it and I felt a little jolt of surprise at its loveliness: a perfect cumulus cloud of whipped cream nestled in the circumference of a pale, flaky crust. When he cut into it and revealed the sunny layer of lemon, I let out a little "ahhhhhhhh." And when I tasted it, "mmmmmmmmm." Not just a regular "mmmmmmmmm," but an "mmmmmmmmm" that widens your eyes and crescendos into a question mark (Is it really this good?) before landing in a sharp exclamation point (Yes, it is!).

I had never been a big pie person before that, aside from Thanksgiving pumpkin, which I adored. Lemon pies had crossed my path, but they always had one or more unappealing elements: a weepy, flavorless meringue, a sickly sweet middle or a soggy crust. No one in my family had ever thought to dispense with the chore of beating egg whites into a stiff, formal meringue in favor of the easier and tastier task of whipping fresh cream into pillowy mounds. No one had summoned the nerve to ban the increasingly ubiquitous (and thoughtless) graham cracker crust at family gatherings.

Not long after our summer feast, Rick took off for the West Coast. So I never had the pie again, but it remained in my food-memory universe like a distant, beckoning sun, like the Platonic Form of the Lemon Pie (Hey, we were both philosophy majors).

Last year I asked him for the recipe. His mom snail-mailed it to him, and he dutifully typed it up into an e-mail with the subject line "The Pie" and endearing little notes in parentheses like "My mom says a key to good crusts is having everything cold, so start by mixing the flour and salt in a bowl and then place the shortening on top and put in the fridge until chilled"; or "My mom just uses the kitchen counter; you could also try one of those pastry mats"; or "Another tip from my mom is to not press too hard but to roll it out just a bit at a time."

A year after I got the recipe, I decided I was up to the task of actually making it vs. fantasizing about it. So with Erin's help and encouragement last weekend, the pie (pictured above) became a reality again.

It was beautiful and delicious — exactly what I remembered. (How often do resurrected memories live up to their promise?)

And the best thing: Rick is home for the holidays, so I can finally say, "Hey, I made your mom's pie." And maybe send him off with one.

BAY OF (MACHO) PIGS

I'm filling in at work for someone who's on vacation. Part of her job is handling letters to the editor.

So I get a call this morning from a guy who asks, "Who's in charge of letters?" And whaddya know? I'm obliged to say, "I am."

He tells me that his wife wrote a letter to the editor when she "wasn't thinking clearly" and that she doesn't want it published. He says he needs to "retrieve" the letter. I say OK, fine, but I have to hear that from the actual letter writer and not someone who purports to be speaking on that person's behalf. I explain to him that the policy is to confirm letters with the people who write them, so when the letter arrives I will call his wife and if she decides that she doesn't want it to run she can tell me then. Or she can call me before then, if she desires. He gets a strain of huffy incredulity in his voice and says, "But I'm her husband. And I don't want it to run."

The macho-pig-seeking missiles in my brain automatically begin to launch — I hear all the hatches opening with metallic, unstoppable determination — but before they exit my mouth I am able to defuse them. And I also successfully resist the urge to say, "Dude. Do you have any idea to whom you are speaking? You are speaking to someone who worshipped Simone de Beauvoir in high school and flirted with Andrea Dworkin in college. Dworkin, hon. Are we clear?" Instead, I re-explain the letters policy in a calm, clear voice, leaving him no idea of the doomsday destruction he has just been spared.

He repeats the "argument" that he is her husband. And I repeat the rule that only letter writers may "retrieve" their letters. In other words, paper covers rock. He says, "She won't." I say, "That's her decision."

We've reached a silent, uncomfortable détente.

He grouchily hangs up. I sit there for a minute wondering:

(1) Did I just have this conversation with a grown man in the year 2008?
(2) How do people live like that?
(3) What kind of a personal world does he inhabit that makes him think his request would naturally be honored?
(4) Will he now take his frustration out on his wife in some hideous way?
(5) Will he blame Barack Obama's victory for women becoming uppity?
(6) Where did I put that copy of "Intercourse"?