In this week’s New Yorker, James Wood (who is appearing at the Y for a Critics & Brunch program in October) offers a bounty of praise for Marilynne Robinson’s new novel, Home, released yesterday:

Above all, there is the precision and lyrical power of her language, and the way it embodies a struggle—the fight with words, the contemporary writer’s fight with the history of words and the presence of literary tradition, the fight to use the best words to describe both the visible and the invisible world. Here, for instance, is how the narrator of “Housekeeping,” Robinson’s first novel, describes her dead grandmother, who lies in bed with her arms wide open and her head flung back: “It was as if, drowning in air, she had leaped toward ether.” In the same novel, the narrator imagines her grandmother pinning sheets to a clothesline, on a windy day—“Say that when she had pinned three corners to the lines it began to billow and leap in her hands, to flutter and tremble, and to glare with the light, and that the throes of the thing were as gleeful and strong as if a spirit were dancing in its cerements.” “Cerements,” an old word for burial cloth, is Robinson in her Melvillean mode, and is one of many moments in her earlier work when she sounds like the antiquarian Cormac McCarthy. But stronger than that fancy word is the plain and lovely “the throes of the thing,” with its animism and its homemade alliteration.

Her new novel, “Home,” begins simply, eschewing obvious verbal fineness, and slowly grows in luxury—its last fifty pages are magnificently moving, and richly pondered in the way of “Gilead.”

Marilynne Robinson returns to the Y (you can watch video of her here with Robert Alter) on September 25 for a reading with John Crowley who will give a preview from his as yet unpublished Four Freedoms, due out in Spring of 2009. They will be introduced by Pat Strachan and Christopher Beha, respectively.

ALSO: New York magazine’s Vulture blog highly recommends Daniel Mendelsohn’s latest book of essays, How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken. Mendelsohn, winner of the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award, appears at the Y in March.