President Obama’s hour-long conversation with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Marilynne Robinson, published in two parts in the New York Review of Books, inspired responses that were so hyperbolic and adoring, it felt like 2008 all over again.
According to Vox, it “is the most revealing interview of Obama’s presidency.” (As the president would say, “let me be clear”: This was a conversation, not an interview. An interview implies that Obama speaks less than Robinson.) It threatens Oprah’s “position as America’s most sought-after author interviewer,” says the Guardian. Vogue calls it “riveting, and somehow more informative than the many interviews in which Obama is the one fielding the questions.” All that’s missing is a Chris Matthews leg-thrill. (The second part, published last Tuesday, hasn’t garnered nearly as much attention.)
Anyone who hasn’t already voted twice for President Obama will be skeptical of this praise—yet anybody who thinks that a healthy national culture needs good literary fiction should read the conversation. The problem is that much of the exchange consists of two people agreeing about politics, which makes it disappointingly dull.
Among the conversation’s few legitimate “revelations” is the president’s description of the role fiction played in his personal development:
This is among the most common and compelling arguments for not only novel-reading, but the Humanities in general. It’s exciting to hear it from a president rather than a teacher desperate to convince students to pay attention.
The president’s admiration of Robinson is also endearing. Christian Lorentzen aptly says that the president “has a touch of the old SNL sketch ‘The Chris Farley Show’ about him: ‘Remember when you wrote Gilead? That was awesome.’” Obama doesn’t pretend to have read all of her work—his specific references seem limited to her recent essay “Fear” and her masterpiece, 2004’s Gilead. But he knows those works well, and for much of the first part he asks about her early interest in reading and writing, her writing process, and her specific thematic concerns.
I suspect that one reason Obama and his team wanted to talk to Robinson was to remind us all that the president is a writer. A Great Writer. This was an important narrative during his first campaign. Penguin reinforced it when they published his early speeches alongside works by Lincoln and Emerson. He’s the writer in chief. He thinks like a writer.
From that perspective, the experiment is a wasted opportunity, because the president says nothing about his own writing. Nor does either of them discuss any writers other than Robinson; there is no mention of her influences or her favorite authors. The only extended discussion of a single work is Obama’s praise of the Broadway musical Hamilton.
Robinson herself occasionally seems more eager to discuss politics than writing. Late in the discussion, the president asks, “how do you think your writer’s sensibility changes how you think about [the news]? Or are you just kind of in the mix like everybody else, and just, ah, that red team drives me nuts, and you’re cheering for the blue?”
Robinson dodges the literary element of the question. Apparently addressing the immigration debates of the Republican primary, she explains that “insulting people that you know will become citizens—however that’s managed—giving them this bitter memory to carry into their participation in the national life. Why do that?”
She assumes an awful lot here. Are we really sure that all illegal immigrants are going to become citizens? Does she know something about the president’s plans for another executive order? (No, that’s not a conspiracy theory; it’s a joke.)
This brings me to a major reason that the full conversation is frequently dull: Robinson and Obama agree about virtually everything. The conversation is often just two Democrats worrying about the direction of the country. You’ve probably already heard a million such conversations.
Apart from a late passage in which Robinson criticizes economic competition, China, and globalism in a way that seems to make the president squirm, the closest they come to disagreement is when Obama occasionally suggests that Robinson is being a bit too pessimistic. Ezra Klein rightly says that Obama acts like Robinson’s “comforter in chief.” Because she’s often the more opinionated of the two, he gets the chance to pose as what so many journalists still consider him to be: the Prince of Pragmatism! The King of Compromise!
(On the audio version, the frequent dullness is exacerbated by Obama’s monotone voice and very…slow… delivery. There were a couple of moments when he took so long to find his words that I thought my phone battery had died. He makes NPR contributors sound like Gus Johnson.)
The uniformity of their opinion blinds them to contradictions in their arguments. When Obama asks her about Christians in America who “posit an ‘us versus them’” way of seeing the world, Robinson responds:
This line of argument does precisely what it condemns. Nobody expresses a stronger “us versus them” attitude than the people who complain about “us versus them” attitudes, who always imply that it’s “we” who have the right attitude and “they” who threaten Christianity and democracy. It’s an unavoidable othering.
The president’s ideological kinship with Robinson also helps him slip into bad rhetorical habits:
Notice how he conflates the desire for less government with the desire for no government. For him, the notion the government is not always the best problem-solver is the same as believing that the government is never necessary.
Of course, this is how most people speak around those who think like them. It’s just especially disappointing in this instance because the conversation could have been a much less predictable exchange of artistic and literary ideas.
Still, there is one more—perhaps the most—surprising and newsworthy moment. During an exchange about elections, Robinson says that she wishes our democracy worked more like her departmental meetings at the University of Iowa.
And with that, she became the first person ever to cite academic administrative meetings as a model of functional governance.
Christopher J. Scalia, a former English professor, works at a PR firm in Washington, D.C.
