Robinson, Marilynne. Gilead. 2004. F; 1/06.

Terrific fiction, even though just occasionally a bit heavy going. The narrator has to be challenging for a modern female author: male, and a Methodist clergyman in the 1950s. There is a wonderful statement of Christian (theist, I guess) ontology (page 178-179): there is this completely inaccessible type of existence which bears the same relationship to the things “on our list of known and nameable things” (what we might claim to exist) as an author to a book. Proofs of this existence “claim for God a place within our conceptual grasp.” A friend of mine understands this in citing vertigo contemplating why there is anything at all. No ceiling…