What Book to Read?

This book comes highly recommended. Published in 2004, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005. This prize is given annually to a piece of ‘distinguished fiction’ by an American author, preferably dealing with American life. As well as being greeted with critical acclaim in both the US and the UK, Gilead is said to be a favourite of President Barak Obama. Yet it is such an unassuming little book.

Gilead is a ‘shabby old town’ in Iowa, named after the Old Testament town of Gilead (Genesis 37.25). The Reverend John Ames has lived there most of his life; it is ‘very near [his] heart’. It is 1956, and he is now 76. He has been diagnosed with angina pectoris; he thinks he will die soon. Ames’s first wife died in childbirth, and the baby died too. Late in life he has married a younger woman, and now has a child nearly seven years old. The book is the ‘letter’, in the form of a discontinuous diary containing reflections and recollections, which Ames hopes his son will read when he is grown up.

Ames wants his son to know something of his family history, and his account of his father and grandfather is one of the narrative threads that emerges from the diary. Ames’s father and grandfather were both preachers, but were diametrically opposed on issues of war and pacifism. The grandfather left Gilead in old age to wander in Kansas; one of Ames’s formative experiences was to travel with his father in search of his grandfather’s grave. The relationship between fathers and sons is also the theme of a second narrative thread tracing the tensions between Ames’s friend, Robert Boughton, and his wayward son, Jack. A third thread concerns Ames’s relationship with his wife Lila; Ames makes it clear that this is profound and loving without actually saying much about it. These themes give a surprisingly satisfying shape to what seem at first to be random jottings.

Ames is a gentle man who has spent his life trying to do the right thing, to find beauty in everyday scenes and activities and to understand and explain the word of God to himself and his parishioners. His observations often have a faintly self deprecatory tone, which stops him being preachy or pompous. ‘I don’t write the way I speak’, he says. ‘I am afraid you would think I didn’t know any better. I don’t write as I do for the pulpit, either, insofar as I can help it. That would be ridiculous, in the circumstances. I do try to write the way I think. But of course that all changes as soon as I put it into words. And the more it does seem to be my thinking, the more pulpitish it sounds, which I guess is inevitable. I will resist that inflection, nevertheless’. If, however, you have an outright aversion to religion, you’re probably not going to take much pleasure in this book.

On the surface, nothing much happens. But there is an underlying narrative that gives strength to the story. And here I again ran up against the issue of assumed knowledge. What, for example, are ‘free soilers’? And why is a meeting between Ames’s grandfather and John Brown noteworthy? This becomes clearer as the story progresses, so maybe it is not necessary to know from the start. But the significance of these matters for Ames’s family – and for the Boughtons – ties their story into the national one and gives it greater weight. When I did some checking, what I found out added considerably to my enjoyment of the book, and to an understanding of why it might have appealed to President Obama.

In 2008, Robinson’s novel Home was published; it is a companion to Gilead and deals with the Boughton family at the same period. It won the 2009 Orange Prize for fiction.

The Sunday Times called her ‘the world’s best writer of prose’. Check out the article here.

If you want to know more about the events that underlie the story, try Bleeding Kansas, or John Brown.