Marilynne Robinson’s new novel, Lila, has been one of the most anticipated books of the season. Robinson, who was born in Idaho and now teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is a seventy-one-year-old Christian woman. She writes novels that are explicitly religious in a distinctly American way. She has praised John Calvin, the severe proponent of the doctrine of predestination, as a misunderstood Christian humanist. In other words, everything about her flies in the face of what the literati would consider sophisticated, cool, creative, and good, which is why her literary stardom is a particular curiosity.

Robinson broke onto the literary scene in 1980 with her first novel, Housekeeping, about two sisters in the aftermath of their mother’s suicide. She has continued to dazzle readers since. Gilead, published a decade ago, took the form of a letter that the seventy-seven-year-old Reverend John Ames, a pastor of the Congregational Church in the Iowa town of Gilead, writes to his seven-year-old son on the eve of the old man’s death. Gilead, which sometimes reads more like theology than contemporary fiction, is a contemplative meditation on faith and being. It won the Pulitzer in 2005 and Robinson was awarded a National Humanities Medal in 2012.

While Gilead is the story of Ames, Lila, currently a finalist for the National Book Award, tells the life story of Ames’s wife, a deeply introspective woman nearly half his age. The story, set about a decade earlier