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While most recent fiction has been more mindful of its porous border with film, the novels of Marilynne Robinson have reclaimed ground on other fronts, fiction's borders with poetry and the reflective or lyrical essay. The four books are both freestanding and highly interrelated. Three share key protagonists and events, and the latest of these, Lila, pairs well in both style and theme with Robinson's first novel, Housekeeping. The novels all enhance each other while building a larger vision of life out of which each seems to be cut. This is surely a sacral vision, but made of the same facts and materials with which another writer might have built a worldly or even a cynical one. Robinson has given the world a hard-headed, convincing portrayal of the life of the spirit in a secular civilization.

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