What Book to Read?

Marilynne Robinson has produced only a small amount of fiction, but some critics think she is one of the best writers in America. Her first, and highly acclaimed novel, Housekeeping, appeared in 1980, but there was no second novel until Gilead, in 2004. This book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005. Her third book, Home, was published in 2008, and won the 2009 Orange Prize. It covers some of the same ground as Gilead, but is not a sequel; I’ve seen it described as a companion, or a ‘sibling’, which seems an apt description.

Gilead takes the form of a letter from the Congregational pastor John Ames to his young son. Ames is seventy-six and has heart disease; there are things he wants his son to know that his father won’t be there to tell him. There is also a sort of side story about Jack, the son of Ames’s good friend and neighbour, the Presbyterian pastor Robert Boughton. Home is set at the same time – 1956 – and in the same place. It is about Jack and his father, and his sister, Glory. A number of the incidents Ames describes are recounted from the Boughtons’ point of view. But the central fact of Jack’s story, which he reveals to Ames in Gilead, is not revealed to the reader of Home until the very end of the book. No doubt Robinson meant Home to be a stand-alone book, but I can’t help thinking that Jack’s revelations in Gilead add depth to Home.

Jack is the prodigal son. He has been away from his family home in Gilead, a small town in Iowa, for more than twenty years. Growing up in a large and mainly happy family, he was the odd one out, always seeming to choose to do what was mean and hurtful – lying, stealing, and ultimately, something much worse. But his family, particularly his father, never stopped loving him, and praying for his soul. What has he been doing all this time? Why has he now returned?  Boughton is old and sick – much frailer than his friend Ames. He is being cared for by his youngest daughter, Glory, who has returned to Gilead to look after him. And she also has secrets of her own.

It’s difficult to convey the power of this book. The story is slight; the focus is largely on the interactions between the characters – their silences and evasions, as well as what they actually say. The story is told in the third person, though from Glory’s point of view. As in Gilead, grace and redemption are central issues; there is even the same conversation about predestination and the question of whether a person can change as in the earlier book. Robinson is a theologian, as well as a creative writing teacher, and as I wrote in my review of Gilead, if you dislike anything to do with religion, you may not enjoy her work.  She is, however, acutely aware of the possibility of complacency and hypocrisy attendant on religious observance. I thought a strength of Gilead was the way in which Ames’s story linked to some of major themes of American history. This linkage is less pronounced in this book, though it is there in a particularly poignant way if you have also read Gilead. The lesser emphasis on history perhaps throws the weight on religion into greater focus. This is not familiar territory for me, but I don’t find Robinson preachy; rather the emphasis on religion is human and humane. It is about people trying to find a way of explaining their actions and desires – which is surely what all great literature is about.

Whatever you think of Robinson’s ideas, she writes beautifully. Critics comment on her sense of place, and the descriptions of rural Iowa – ‘the smell of ripe fields, and water and cattle and evening’ – are beautiful. But it is her wry perception of human strengths and weaknesses that moves me. To take some fairly random examples: ‘Even as children they had been good in fact, but also in order to be seen as good. There was something disturbingly like hypocrisy about it all, though it was meant only to compensate for Jack, who was so conspicuously not good as to cast a shadow over their household.’ And Glory, who feels trapped in Gilead, thinks ‘It is as if I had a dream of adult life and woke up from it, still here in my parents’ house.’ And ‘If Jack’s notions of privacy were generally indistinguishable from furtiveness, there was only more reason to be cautious about offending them.’ These are just perfect sentences.

Though Ames is old and ill in Gilead, and sorry that he won’t see his son grow up, it is nevertheless a happy and hopeful book. Home is neither of these; it’s one of the saddest books I’ve ever read.

You can read more about Marilynne Robinson here.