The Americans for whom Robinson wrote Mother Country have likely never heard of Sellafield. But they have heard of Chernobyl. When I visited the Ukraine at the age of fifteen, the 1986 accident at Chernobyl was sufficiently distant to be a punch line among the Ukrainians: “How do you know the directions to Chernobyl? Just drive north until your skin starts to glow.” “I can count on my fingers the number of times I have visited Chernobyl: thirteen.” But a punchline for the Ukrainians was a boon for Sellafield, because the meltdown at Chernobyl drew attention away from earlier, less catastrophic, nuclear power plant accidents. When Chernobyl became the worst nuclear accident in history, it took that title away from the 1957 fire at the Windscale nuclear plant in Great Britain. Windscale has since been renamed Sellafield. But nobody’s skin glowed at Windscale. Therefore, the defenders of Sellafield can argue: how bad can it be? It was no Chernobyl.

The 2019 HBO miniseries Chernobyl was not produced under the current administration by accident. It is an extended parable of what happens when bureaucratic face-saving, the propagandizing of science, and civilizational yes-manning face the brute realities of the physical world. No stretch of the imagination was required to see here a veiled critique of the Trump Administration, especially in the climactic speech of the protagonist and truth-telling scientist Valery Legasov before the Soviet investigating body: “[our secrets and our lies] are practically what defines us. When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember that it is still there, but it is still there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.” An administration puts out enough alternative facts, and pretty soon your citizens’ skin will start to glow.

For all the much-heralded success of that series, it finally succumbs to a kind of soteriology of the hard sciences. The truth-telling scientist is the hero who, with charts and graphs aplenty, brings the corrupt government to repentance. And the history books teach us that this was precisely the role that Prof. Legasov played for Chernobyl. But there would be no scientific vindicator for Robinson’s claims. The reviews of Mother Country were, in her own words, almost universally “horrible, nasty, ghastly awful.” “Here in Britain we are all criminals,” wrote Dr. M.F. Perutz, winner of the 1962 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, summarizing Robinson’s complaint against the British people in the New York Review of Books. But, he would continue, the long history of British disdain for the poor was matched by American disdain for them (“Has she never read John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath?” he inquires of the future instructor at the Iowa Workshop) and by more widespread European disdain for the poor as well. Perutz’s argument here seems to be that particularly acute instances of malice can be mitigated by a background milieu of malice, just like the radiation contagion from Sellafield was drowned out by the background radiation from Chernobyl and from the sun.

Robinson’s concerns thus dismissed, Perutz concludes by dismissing her person: “she should have stuck to writing novels.” Decades later, precisely this line of retort continues. Donald Wittman, economist at UC Santa Cruz, responded to Robinson just this year with eerie similarity to Perutz: “I suggest that novelists should not write essays on economics and that economists should not write essays on literature.” The condescension from these replies oozes like plutonium into the Irish Sea—low grade yet ubiquitous, sufficiently incidental to be deniable by the scientist but palpable to the humanist. This reply occasioned its own series of replies from other impressively credentialed scientists who could not reach consensus on the real effects of dumping plutonium into the sea. One wonders what the confidence threshold of harmlessness ought to be before one consents to undertaking such an irreversible course of action.

In almost every single one of her responses to these critics, Robinson spends paragraphs fixing Sellafield before our eyes, describing again in detail precisely what goes on there. Ethicists sometimes note that the most morally heroic people explain their actions not with reference to ethical theory, or ethical reflection at all, but simply in terms of the brute facts of the situation: “The house was on fire and she needed help.” They speak as if, for them, the moral demand emerges spontaneously from the observed facts of the matter. Robinson’s constant retort to her interlocutors is like this. Perutz says there is no threat here. Robinson responds that they are pumping plutonium into the sea.

But Perutz is not content merely to condescend; he wants also to identify a double-standard, a favoritism, perhaps even some jingoism: “Her account would make one believe that social deprivation has never existed in the United States.” Of course this is a distraction; Robinson’s recent social writings have focused almost entirely on the social deprivation of the United States. And even Mother Country makes it clear that her object is America, not Britain. She speaks of America when she laments that “we have sacrificed our humanity to preserve countries that connive in the production of the worst sort of explosives and toxins and their release into the environment. There is nothing pleasant in this fact. It has no place in the story. When the Russians hear all the prattle about Western values they must surely assume they permit plutonium dumping. Who can argue? It may be more than their absolutist history that prevents them from being converted by the force of western example.” Robinson here takes up the mantle of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Whittaker Chambers, who both proclaimed to the West that the corruption there was not categorically different from that in the USSR.

But Perutz’s criticism does contain this kernel of insight: Robinson’s barbs against the United Kingdom are not those of the loyal opposition, but those of a daughter of Britain’s greatest rogue colony. They are the critiques of an outsider. When she insists that Sellafield is little more than the result of British national pusillanimity—“Britain has never had to justify to its people the possession of nuclear weapons on any grounds other than their assuring that the country would continue to cut an impressive figure on the world stage. It has never had to excuse the slovenliness with which the great enterprise was gone about on any grounds other than Britain’s littleness and poverty”—it is clear that her target is not Sellafield, but something rather like the entire character of the British nation. But Britain is not her home. Prophets are not without honor except in their hometown, but hometown prophets at least have the credibility of calling their own house to repent. But in Mother Country, Robinson is the Taylor Swift of environmental degradation, who upbraids and obsesses continually about the malfeasance of her former lover, to whom she no longer has any real allegiance.

This is something that Robinson has largely remedied in her subsequent writing. Robinson is interested in Britain, but she is obsessed with America. It is America where she makes her home and where she sets her novels. America is now the most common target of her barbs. She writes now not to the Gentiles, but to the wayward tribes of the house of Israel—not to remedy the maladies of faraway locales, but to make more perfect the union in which she makes her own abode.

Yet the method by which she chastises America is not the same as that by which she once chastised the British. By grounding continued environmental degradation in the long history of Britain, Robinson ascribes to Britain a path dependency of diminution; these evils, according to her long historical genealogy of the Poor Laws, are woven into the very DNA of the United Kingdom, and therefore entirely predictable, if not inevitable. The deep origins of these evils are in the annals of British history.

It is significant that she never speaks this way about America. In her jeremiads against America, its failings are never fulfilments of a long destiny, but rather deviations from its essential identity and its original promise. In this way, Robinson’s treatment of America is far more metaphysically Christian than is her treatment of Britain. It seems that, for Robinson, America’s being is interchangeable with its essential goodness, and its multitudinous deficiencies are privations of that being, and incidental to it. Robinson can imagine an America with even more existence than it has now, with liberty and justice for all, a society of citizens in rather constant rapture at the dignity and luminosity of their fellow citizens. It is true that this is not the America we now inhabit, but repentance is always possible when we fall from the purportedly original and historic greatness of the nation.

Robinson’s is an Americanism without blinders and a gratitude without idolatry. She writes an encouragement for Americans to view themselves with altogether less groveling than that to which they are accustomed:

“Americans abroad hope so wistfully for approval that they are in effect seduced by the least acceptance, and dashed by the slightest rejection, a weightless people incapable of seeing and judging, as if stuck forever in the most desolate straits of adolescence, merely wishing to be liked and accepted, considering the world well lost if, before the lights go out, they have a murmur of approval from some foreign person.”

But Mother Country was published in the summer of 1989, right before the Berlin Wall’s fall inaugurated an era of unchallenged hegemony by the United States. One no longer observes Americans with an inferiority complex at the Eiffel Tower, the Coliseum, the Great Wall, nor does one see any hints of groveling in their garrulousness and physical girth, nor in their expectations that every person they encounter address them with greater English fluency than they themselves possess. Americans won the world in 1989, and every American tourist since then has been taking a global victory lap. Some of them still refer unironically to Freedom Fries. None of them has ever heard of Sellafield.

And yet Robinson loves these Americans. In her 2015 essay “Fear”, she prefaces her excoriation of her countrymen with a profession of allegiance to them: “I defer to no one in my love for America and for Christianity. I have devoted my life to the study of both of them. I have tried to live up to my association with them.” Perhaps this is one reason why so many have felt nurtured and comforted by Robinson’s writing after Mother Country. Marilynne believes in us. We might look at our neighbors, or our classmates, or our social media nemeses, and wonder whether her faith in them is rather misplaced and romantic. But it still does stir the soul to have someone believe in us like this. Her belief in the promise of America and the potential of Americans, but disappointment with much of the actuality of America, allows Robinson’s political philosophy to consist largely in comparing America to America, and finding it deficient. The presumption in each of these critiques is that America does not suffer the same kind of path dependency that England does. We Americans are free to mend, and to sabotage, our own efforts. Or, at least, we ought to act as though we are thus free. Sellafield is the result of British national pusillanimity, but Robinson believes we ought never treat Americans as though they are pusillanimous:

“Put aside the notion of country and imagine 320 million souls who happen to be passing their mortal time on this continent. Why should we discourage them from major aspiration? Say 15 percent are black, 51 percent are women. Is it at all consistent with their aspirations to be told that whatever their gifts, an ultimate mediocrity awaits them?”

She learned this, no doubt, from Emerson: “Treat a man as he is, and he will remain as he is. Treat a man as he could be, and he will become what he should be.” But surely this psychological feature is as true for the British as it is for the Americans. After Mother Country, she seems to have learned her Emersonian lesson well, and she no longer attributes the flaws of her opponents to their deep history.