Marilynne Robinson and Calvinism

I am have been plodding my way through Marilynne Robinson's 1980 novel Housekeeping. For whatever reason, I am having a hard time connecting with the characters and the novel as a whole. That is why I was glad to read Thomas Gardiner's essay "Marilynne Robinson, Narrative Calvinist." Gardiner explores the theological dimensions of Robinson's writing in a way that has helped me make better sense of Housekeeping. Here is a taste:

For Robinson, Calvin's theology centers on the belief that God has given individuals the ability to commune with and respond to him without the mediation of priests or bishops. "Perception is at the center of Calvin's theology," she observes; God willingly floods our senses with his grandeur in such a way that we can take it in and reflect it back, his glory "shining forth" as we participate in it. "It is as if we were to find a tender solicitude toward us in the fact that the great energy that rips galaxies apart also animates our slightest thoughts." Think how elevated a vision of the human soul this is, Robinson suggests, and how far it is from how we often view ourselves.

At the same time, our ability to perceive God is deeply compromised. None of us sees clearly; indeed, none of us even desires to. All of us turn away from God's presence, failing "to acknowledge what ought to be obvious," Robinson writes, inclined instead "to indolence and selfishness, dishonesty, pride and error, cruelty." She calls the notion of total depravity the "counterweight to Calvin's rapturous humanism," insisting that we can't understand the one aspect of his thought without the other.

Working together, writes Robinson, these twinned elements of "our strangely mixed nature" mean that the passage of a soul "through the vale of its making, or its destruction" will be marked by halts and recoveries, each attempt to find meaning chastened by a recognition of limits. This almost exactly describes Ruth's voice in Housekeeping, now traced to one of its sources...