You can't like everything

I don't have much luck with lyrical fiction. The Man Booker Prize winning the Sea mystified me and I just put down Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping. Like the Sea, this book is all lovely language and no story. If you are looking for beautiful evocations of life on a barren plain, then you are in luck. If you want some story, not so much. The thing is I really liked Gilead, her more recent effort. That book, also an exercise in precise and gorgeous language, I found to be much more emotionally engaging, although it could very well be that I more naturally sympathized with the protagonist, a dying father writing to a child.

Apparently Robinson has more to say about the Gilead story as she has written Home, a book which focuses on another household from that story. It comes out in September.