NEW YORK Thu Jan 15, 2015 8:08am EST

Critically-acclaimed author Marilynne Robinson has written only four novels since 1980, but is widely considered among the country's best fiction writers.

In her latest, "Lila," Robinson returns to the fictional town of Gilead, Iowa, the setting for her two previous novels, "Home" and the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Gilead."

The book chronicles Lila's almost feral youth with a drifter named Doll, and her eventual marriage to the Reverend John Ames, a widower.

Robinson, 71, spoke with Reuters about writing and "Lila," which was a finalist for the National Book Award.

 

Q: Had you anticipated writing something related to "Gilead" and "Home"?

A: No, I hadn't. I think I expected not to, but the character was very strongly in my mind.

Q: What surprised you about how this story unfolded?

A: I think her resistance, her caution. I knew that she would find it difficult to enter this life that she was entering, but I didn't know what her resistance would look like.

Q: Do you think there is a dominant theme to the book?

A: I think that my subject is the capacity for dignity and beauty of perception in people society does not necessarily value.

Q: Before "Gilead," in 2004, your only previous novel was published in 1980, but you've since published two more novels in comparatively quick succession. Any reason for the pick-up?

A: I have no idea. I get an idea in my mind, and if concentration forms around it, it becomes a book or an essay.

Q: How differently do you feel, if at all, while steeped in a novel as opposed to a piece of non-fiction?

A: One of the main differences for me is when I'm a novelist, I have the sense of entertaining, a vision, images that I will live with for a long time, that will have a long development. My essays tend to be focused around things that I find problematic in my own thinking, and therefore they tend to have a focal point that the essay is built around.

Q: Which do you think is more valuable, to yourself and society, and why?

A: I think the novels are more valuable. A novel in its nature is very dimensional and it can question itself and create alternates to itself in ways that essays are not really meant to do. They're just a better model of how things are and they call for a kind of imaginative investment on the part of the reader that I think is also capable of much more complexity. The world is difficult, the world is complicated, and the acknowledgement of complexity is probably the beginning of the right response to any issue or question.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I have a collection of essays that will probably come out next fall. It's finished except for little adjustments. I have a couple of other non-fiction projects on my mind, one dealing with the Old Testament, the other with Shakespeare.