The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016

by Rachel Kushner

  —But, if you are the only one in your circumstance, why do you need a different name? Shouldn’t your circumstance alone be the name itself? If it is specific to you?

  The examiner laughed.

  —Very good, very good. But it isn’t necessarily so, because not everyone has perfect information. So, if they saw me on one day at the lake, and then a week later by that distant field, they might not know that I was the same person, unless I had told them my name. If I had, they could speak to me and use my name, and thereby confirm that it was me.

  —But what if there were two of you with the same name?

  —That is a problem. It is—and it comes up. In any case, I have a name. That gardener has a name. Everyone has a name. Everyone but you.

  —Why don’t I have a name?

  —You don’t have a name because you are starting over. You are beginning from the beginning. You are allowed to make mistakes and to fail. You don’t need to do that under a real name, a name that will stay with you. We give you the freedom to make every conceivable mistake and have them all be forgotten. So, for now you will have a conditional name. You will have a name while you are here in this first village. Here your name is Anders.

  —Anders. Anders.

  He said it quietly to himself.

  —Can you say it again? Say it again, she said.

  —Anders. Anders, he said. But what shall I call you?

  —You can call me Teresa. That is not my real name either. It is the name for the examiner that orbits you. Teresa and Anders. Names always function this way, though people don’t think about it. They only exist in reference to each other.

  —I’m not any more Anders to that gardener than I was a moment ago.

  —You aren’t. And his name is hidden from you. Perhaps forever.

  —Where did my name come from? What does Anders mean?

  She thought for a minute.

  —I believe it is a Scandinavian name, or perhaps it is German. Let me say completely how it was for me in the moment I named you Anders. That is as close to the meaning of this use of Anders as we can get.

  She stood up and went to the window.

  —When I was young, there was a girl who lived on the same street as me. Her name was Matilda Colone. She was very pretty and she wore beautiful clothes. She was the envy of everyone at my school, and she was blind. How can that be? Of course, it isn’t silly for grown people with circumspection and wisdom to envy a blind person who happens to be extraordinary. However, for children to do so—when the world is so bright and good to look at . . . you may imagine that it is surprising.

  He nodded.

  —She was elegant and calm. She learned her lessons perfectly. She had a seat in the classroom by a window, and the breeze would ruffle her hair or the scarf she wore, and we would all look at her and look at her and look at her. Matilda Colone, we would say under our breath. The teachers adored her, and everyone wanted to be her friend. But, she needed no friends, and would have none. Of all the things she had, and she had many, the best thing was that she had a brother, named Anders, and he sat beside her in class. He walked beside her to school. He brought her her lunch. He held her coat; he held it up, and then she would put it on. He was very smart, smarter than anyone in the class, except perhaps Matilda, but it was hard to say, because they would never cross each other. It was a school for the smartest children in the region. We all loved her so much that we could almost weep.

  —What happened to her?

  —This was in the old days. Her father shot himself, and she and Anders were separated and put into homes. Some years after that she died of pneumonia.

  —Anders, he said to himself.

  10.

  Each night, the examiner would say to the claimant something like this (not this, but something like it):

  Tomorrow we are going to wake up early. I am going to wake early and you are going to wake early. This will happen because I am sure to do so, and I will come and see to it that you are woken up. Then, I shall dress and you shall dress, and we will go downstairs to the kitchen. In the kitchen, we shall have our breakfast and we will enjoy the morning light. We will talk about the furnishings in the room. We will talk about the paintings and the photographs that we talk about each morning. You will have things to say about them and I will listen. I will have things to say to you about the things you have said. In this way, we shall speak. After breakfast, we will wash the dishes we have used and we will put them away. We will stand for a moment in the kitchen, which we will have cleaned, and we will feel a small rise of pleasure at having set things right. It is an enduring satisfaction for our species to make little systems and tend to them.

  Yes, she would continue, we shall go on a walk to the lake, and perhaps this time we will walk around it to the small wood at the back. There we will find the trees that we like. Do you remember them? Do you remember that I like the thin birch that stands by the stream, and that you prefer the huge maple with the roots that block the path? Do you remember when you first saw it, and you ran to it? We shall go there tomorrow, and spend as much time as we want to sitting with those trees, in that quiet place. And when we have done that, we shall come home, walking fast or slow, and we shall . . .

  And in this way she would go through the day and give him a sense that there was something to look forward to, and nothing to fear.

  MARILYNNE ROBINSON

  An Interview with President Obama

  FROM The New York Review of Books

  The following conversation between President Obama and Marilynne Robinson was conducted in Des Moines, Iowa, on September 14, 2015. Robinson is the author of the novels Lila, Home, Housekeeping, and Gilead, which was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. President Obama is the president.

  THE PRESIDENT: Marilynne, it’s wonderful to see you. And as I said as we were driving over here, this is an experiment, because typically when I come to a place like Des Moines, I immediately am rushed over to some political event and I make a speech, or I have a town hall, or I go see some factory and have wonderful conversations with people. But it’s very planned out and scripted. And typically, we’re trying to drive a very particular message that day about education or about manufacturing.

  But one of the things that I don’t get a chance to do as often as I’d like is just to have a conversation with somebody who I enjoy and I’m interested in; to hear from them and have a conversation with them about some of the broader cultural forces that shape our democracy and shape our ideas, and shape how we feel about citizenship and the direction that the country should be going in.

  And so we had this idea that why don’t I just have a conversation with somebody I really like and see how it turns out. And you were first in the queue, because—

  MARILYNNE ROBINSON: Thank you very much.

  THE PRESIDENT: Well, as you know—I’ve told you this—I love your books. Some listeners may not have read your work before, which is good, because hopefully they’ll go out and buy your books after this conversation.

  I first picked up Gilead, one of your most wonderful books, here in Iowa. Because I was campaigning at the time, and there’s a lot of downtime when you’re driving between towns and when you get home late from campaigning. And you and I, therefore, have an Iowa connection, because Gilead is actually set here in Iowa.

  And I’ve told you this—one of my favorite characters in fiction is a pastor in Gilead, Iowa, named John Ames, who is gracious and courtly and a little bit confused about how to reconcile his faith with all the various travails that his family goes through. And I was just—I just fell in love with the character, fell in love with the book, and then you and I had a chance to meet when you got a fancy award at the White House. And then we had dinner and our conversations continued ever since.

  So anyway, that’s enough context. You just have completed a series of essays that are not fiction, and I had a chance to read one of them about fear and the role that fear may be playing in our politics and our de
mocracy and our culture. And you looked at it through the prism of Christianity and sort of the Protestant traditions that helped shape us, so I thought maybe that would be a good place to start.

  Why did you decide to write this book of essays? And why was fear an important topic, and how does it connect to some of the other work that you’ve been doing?

  ROBINSON: Well, the essays are actually lectures. I give lectures at a fair rate, and then when I’ve given enough of them to make a book, I make a book.

  THE PRESIDENT: So you just kind of mash them all together?

  ROBINSON: I do. That’s what I do. But it rationalizes my lecturing, too. But fear was very much—is on my mind, because I think that the basis of democracy is the willingness to assume well about other people.

  You have to assume that basically people want to do the right thing. I think that you can look around society and see that basically people do the right thing. But when people begin to make these conspiracy theories and so on, that make it seem as if what is apparently good is in fact sinister, they never accept the argument that is made for a position that they don’t agree with—you know?

  THE PRESIDENT: Yes.

  ROBINSON: Because [of] the idea of the “sinister other.” And I mean, that’s bad under all circumstances. But when it’s brought home, when it becomes part of our own political conversation about ourselves, I think that that really is about as dangerous a development as there could be in terms of whether we continue to be a democracy.

  THE PRESIDENT: Well, now there’s been that strain in our democracy and in American politics for a long time. And it pops up every so often. I think the argument right now would be that because people are feeling the stresses of globalization and rapid change, and we went through one of the worst financial crises since the Great Depression, and the political system seems gridlocked, that people may be particularly receptive to that brand of politics.

  ROBINSON: But having looked at one another with optimism and tried to facilitate education and all these other things—which we’ve done more than most countries have done, given all our faults—that’s what made it a viable democracy. And I think that we have created this incredibly inappropriate sort of in-group mentality when we really are from every end of the earth, just dealing with each other in good faith. And that’s just a terrible darkening of the national outlook, I think.

  THE PRESIDENT: We’ve talked about this, though. I’m always trying to push a little more optimism. Sometimes you get—I think you get discouraged by it, and I tell you, well, we go through these moments.

  ROBINSON: But when you say that to me, I say to you, you’re a better person than I am.

  THE PRESIDENT: Well, but I want to pick up on the point you made about us coming from everywhere. You’re a novelist but you’re also—can I call you a theologian? Does that sound, like, too stuffy? You care a lot about Christian thought.

  ROBINSON: I do, indeed.

  THE PRESIDENT: And that’s part of the foundation of your writings, fiction and nonfiction. And one of the points that you’ve made in one of your most recent essays is that there was a time in which at least reformed Christianity in Europe was very much “the other.” And part of our system of government was based on us rejecting an exclusive, inclusive—or an exclusive and tightly controlled sense of who is part of the community and who is not, in favor of a more expansive one.

  Tell me a little bit about how your interest in Christianity converges with your concerns about democracy.

  ROBINSON: Well, I believe that people are images of God. There’s no alternative that is theologically respectable to treating people in terms of that understanding. What can I say? It seems to me as if democracy is the logical, the inevitable consequence of this kind of religious humanism at its highest level. And it [applies] to everyone. It’s the human image. It’s not any loyalty or tradition or anything else; it’s being human that enlists the respect, the love of God being implied in it.

  THE PRESIDENT: But you’ve struggled with the fact that here in the United States, sometimes Christian interpretation seems to posit an “us versus them,” and those are sometimes the loudest voices. But sometimes I think you also get frustrated with kind of the wishy-washy, more liberal versions where anything goes.

  ROBINSON: Yes.

  THE PRESIDENT: How do you reconcile the idea of faith being really important to you and you caring a lot about taking faith seriously with the fact that, at least in our democracy and our civic discourse, it seems as if folks who take religion the most seriously sometimes are also those who are suspicious of those not like them?

  ROBINSON: Well, I don’t know how seriously they do take their Christianity, because if you take something seriously, you’re ready to encounter difficulty, run the risk, whatever. I mean, when people are turning in on themselves—and God knows, arming themselves and so on—against the imagined other, they’re not taking their Christianity seriously. I don’t know—I mean, this has happened over and over again in the history of Christianity, there’s no question about that, or other religions, as we know.

  But Christianity is profoundly counterintuitive—“Love thy neighbor as thyself”—which I think properly understood means your neighbor is as worthy of love as you are, not that you’re actually going to be capable of this sort of superhuman feat. But you’re supposed to run against the grain. It’s supposed to be difficult. It’s supposed to be a challenge.

  THE PRESIDENT: Well, that’s one of the things I love about your characters in your novels, it’s not as if it’s easy for them to be good Christians, right?

  ROBINSON: Right.

  THE PRESIDENT: It’s hard. And it’s supposed to be hard. Now, you grew up in Idaho, in a pretty—it wasn’t a big, cosmopolitan place.

  ROBINSON: The word “cosmopolitan” was never applied.

  THE PRESIDENT: Which town in Idaho did you grow up in?

  ROBINSON: [Coeur d’Alene] is where I really grew up.

  THE PRESIDENT: How big was the town when you were growing up?

  ROBINSON: 13,500 people.

  THE PRESIDENT: All right. So that’s a town.

  ROBINSON: Yes, the second-largest city in the state at the time.

  THE PRESIDENT: And how do you think you ended up thinking about democracy, writing, faith the way you do? How did that experience of growing up in a pretty small place in Idaho, which might have led you in an entirely different direction—how did you end up here, Marilynne? What happened? Was it libraries?

  ROBINSON: It was libraries, it was—people are so complicated. It’s like every new person is a completely new roll of the dice, right?

  THE PRESIDENT: Right.

  ROBINSON: I followed what was for me the path of least resistance, which meant reading a lot of books and writing, because it came naturally to me. My brother is excellent in many of these things, you know? And I think we reinforced each other, he and I, but it was perfectly accidental.

  With all respect to that environment, many very smart people do not follow the path in life that people like my brother and I did. You learn from them even if you don’t learn from them in a formal sense. But I always knew what I wanted to do in a sense—I mean, not be, but do. I didn’t really have the concept of author until I was in high school. But I was writing.

  THE PRESIDENT: But you knew you wanted to read and write.

  ROBINSON: Yes, that’s what I wanted to do.

  THE PRESIDENT: Were your parents into books, or did they just kind of encourage you or tolerate your quirkiness?

  ROBINSON: There was great tolerance in the house for quirkiness. No, it’s a funny thing because on the one hand, I’m absolutely indebted to my origins, whatever they are, whatever that means. On the other hand, with all love and respect, my parents were not particularly bookish people.

  THE PRESIDENT: Well, that’s why you have good sense along with sort of an overlay of books on top of good sense. What did your mom and dad do?

  ROBINSON: My mother w
as a stay-at-home mother. My father was a sort of middle-management lumber company guy.

  THE PRESIDENT: But they encouraged it.

  ROBINSON: You know what, they were the adults and we were the kids, you know what I mean? Sort of like two species. But if they noticed we were doing something—drawing or painting or whatever we were doing—then they would get us what we needed to do that, and silently go on with it. One of the things that I think is very liberating is that if I had lived any honest life, my parents would have been equally happy. I was under no pressure.