The Elusive Everyday in the Fiction of Marilynne Robinson

Framing Robinson’s fiction within the dynamics of everyday life, this study highlights the tensions of form and content that haunt moments of transcendence in her work. Although the heightened apprehension of the quotidian in Robinson’s novels often registers powerfully and beautifully in representational terms, its aesthetic intensity is enacted at the expense of characters who patrol the margins of the ordinary with unceasing vigilance. Inhabiting the everyday self-consciously, her protagonists perform a forced relationship to the ordinary that seldom relaxes into the natural or the familiar; scarred by grief, illness, aging, and trauma, they inhabit a world of transcendent beauty suffused with the terrifying threat of loss. Focusing on the experiential dynamics of the lived worlds her novels invoke, The Elusive Everyday argues for the complexity, relevance and contemporaneity of Robinson’s fiction.