Big, prize-winning literary novels tend to have two things in common: extraordinary or world-historical events and hostility or indifference to organised religion. So Marilynne Robinson, who has just won the Orange prize, must have done something remarkable to break both these rules so triumphantly. She has. Set in the small town of Gilead on the Iowa prairie, bordering on Kansas, in 1956 - the middle of America's triumphant century - she has written with unsentimental force and precision about good lives and their limits; about sin in an apparent Eden, and about joy, almost redemption, for ruined and pained characters. Nothing outside the ordinary round of human unhappiness happens at the core of the novel: a recovering alcoholic fails to commit suicide and that's about it. On the outskirts of the book can be glimpsed the larger sins of the time: above all, racism and the struggle against it, which was not itself sinless. Among other things, the novels work as a meditation on America's Calvinist conscience, its strengths and blindnesses, and the way that it moved from fanaticism to smugness in the century after the civil war. But that is not the real reason to praise her, which is that she has also made a small, dust-blown place, and a couple of insignificant lives, and made them matter so much. Most people's lives are not even dramatic enough to make the local papers - at least her prodigal son does that - and yet they are all we have. It takes a great novelist to make that little all enough, as Robinson does.