Susan Felch

If you should pick up Marilynne Robinson's Absence of Mind, I suggest that you begin at the end. This is not simply because Robinson writes wonderfully provocative closing lines, although she does. Every time I read the final sentence of her introduction to the Vintage edition of Calvin's selected works, I'm tempted to applaud: "Behind the aesthetics and the metaphysics of classical American literature, again and again we find the Calvinist soul, universal in its singularity, and full of Calvinist…