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Article: Now, a masterpiece.(Gilead: A Novel)
- Article from:
- National Review
- Article date:
- April 11, 2005
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2005 National Review, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Gilead: A Novel, by Marilynne Robinson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 256 pp., $23)
PROSE worth rereading does not merely communicate: Lucidity with "elegant variations," as they used to be called, is not worth a second look, since you get the point. The best prose makes things happen. It uses pace, rhythm, length of phrase and sentence, pauses, vocabulary, imagery; it brings into being the experienced reality of a mental world.
In his New York Times review of Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead, James Wood wrote that in her work, "silence is itself a quality, [and] the space around words may be full of noises." That should catch anyone's attention; it did ...