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Though Robinson has written only three novels, she is considered by many to be among the top American writers. I agree. My own experience with her three novels has deepened my thoughts and solidified my admiration for her. To me, Gilead is one of the best American novels of all time. It speaks of America’s young past in language that reminds one of the very past it is speaking of. It is crisp and clear yet intricate and syntactically complex. When reading it, we hear not just the Bible but also Melville, Emerson and Theroux. Because Gilead was so perfect to me, I have put off for a long time reading Robinson’s follow-up Home (2008).
It isn’t just because Home was Robinson’s next book that made me wary. It is because Home is a sort of retelling of the events we read about in Gilead. Gilead was a first-person letter/journal written by the Reverend John Ames, the leader of the Congregationalist flock in Gilead, Iowa. Ames is seventy-seven years old, but in his old age he has borne a son with a much younger wife. He knows he won’t be with them for most of their lives. Gilead is Ames’s extended letter to his young son, written over a period of several months so it almost becomes a type of journal in which, while attempting to convey wisdom to his young son, Ames explores himself, eventually coming to a major thorn in his side. During those months, Jack Boughton returns home to Gilead after being absent for twenty years. Jack, whose real name is John Ames Boughton, is the son of Ames’s best friend, the Presbyterian minister, Old Robert Boughton. Jack was an unending source of pain to both Old Boughton and Ames; indeed, he was a source of pain to everyone involved, his siblings not excepted.
Sometimes they made their father promise not to tell anyone, by which he knew they meant Reverend Ames, since he was far too discreet to repeat any confidence, except in the confessional of Ames’s stark bachelor kitchen, where, they suspected, such considerations were forgotten. And what was their father not to tell? How they informed on Jack, telling him what Jack had said, what Jack had done or seemed inclined to do.
“I have to know,” their father said. “For his sake.” So they told on their poor scoundrel brother, who knew it, and was irritated or darkly amused, and who kept them informed or misinformed and inspired urgent suspicions among them which they felt they had to pass on, whatever their misgivings, to spare their father having to deal with the sheriff again.
Jack eventually left Gilead after impregnating a young girl, only now to return inexplicably. The last parts in Gilead – after Ames has expressed such deep love of the individual, particularly of his young son, who, he says, he will love unconditionally – show Ames struggling to tolerate the very presence of Jack, let alone to forgive him and love him.
Home takes us to those same months but in the Boughton homestead instead of Ames’s study. Unlike Gilead, Home is a third-person narrative, closely tracking the mind and actions of Glory Boughton, Old Boughton’s youngest daughter. At the beginning of the book she has returned home after her own painful disillusionment — her fiancé of several years is actually a married man. She feels she should have known, if she had wanted to. Now, feeling like she’s regressed to being a child again, Glory takes care of her father as he slowly but surely creeps closer to senility and to the grave. “At this time she could decide nothing about her life. She did not want to think about her life.” Their quiet reverence is disrupted when Old Boughton gets a letter from Jack saying he’s coming home, after twenty years of almost no contact. Old Boughton gets a burst of nervous energy. He thanks God for this blessing and cannot wait to see his lost son. Glory realizes that she was just a young girl when Jack left Gilead; she hardly knows him, though as a young child she always wanted his affection. When Jack comes home, it is uncertain whether he has changed or not. It is also uncertain why he has returned home, though we get the sense that his return was the result of pain and loss, as Glory’s was.
As I read the first one hundred pages or so, I couldn’t let go of the fact that I was not reading Gilead, that Home didn’t match Gilead for its linguistic purity. Also, I loved reading John Ames’s elusively simple writing. The third person narrator doesn’t allow for that same intimacy. I was becoming sadly resigned to the fact that Home, while obviously excellent, would be a disappointment.
But some transformation occurred near the halfway point. Everything in the first 150 pages became deep and Robinson’s layered story took on a life of its own. I looked forward to seeing John Ames, but I didn’t need him in order for me to experience the bubbling life going on under the words. Despite the joy Old Boughton feels at his son’s return home, this is not a simple retelling of the Prodigal Son. Old Boughton can’t help but bring up old grievances. He seems to have forgiven his son, but he can’t help but be amazed at all he’s been through because of Jack.
“And then you really were gone, weren’t you. Twenty years, Jack!”
Jack drew a deep breath and said nothing.
“And why am I talking to you about this? But it was always a mystery to me. Be strict! People would say to me. Lay down the law! Do it for his sake! But I always felt it was sadness I was dealing with, a sort of heavy heartedness. In a child! And how could you be angry at that? I should have known how to help you with it.”
In many aspects Home has a polite, respectful surface. The characters have been brought up to be controlled and to worry more about others’ feelings than their own despair. Or, as we see above, at least cast their grievances as personal failings or incomprehensible aspects of human nature. But the dialogue is taut with distrust, or with moments meant to be light but that remind everyone of the past:
Teddy went to his brother and took Jack’s hand in both his hands and held it. “So it’s true. You’re really here. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I’ve hardly been able to believe it.”
Jack laughed. “I could show you the wound in my side if you like.” Then, “Sorry.” And his head fell, and it was real regret. He was so tired of being himself.
The last half of the book is exceptional. Old Boughton becomes increasingly tyrannical, unrelentingly reminding Jack of just how hard he makes everyone’s lives. Sure, the dying man apologizes, almost immediately, but the intensity behind each attack builds until there are few moments of peace.
“Yes, well, maybe it’s a joke, I don’t know. Last night was about as bad a night as I have passed on this earth. And I kept thinking to myself, asking the Lord, Why do I have to care so much? It seemed like a curse and an affliction to me. To love my own son. How could that be? I have wondered about it many times.”
Beneath this story of human relationships is also a deeply touching, troubling look at human relationships to place, particularly home. I was awed by Robinson’s ability to maintain such a delicate balance between several interrelated elements, and always in that delicate language. The following lengthy passage comes late in the book after a particularly sad night.
And here is the world, she thought, just as we left it. A hot white sky and a soft wind, a murmur among the trees, the treble rasp of a few cicadas. There were acorns in the road, some of them broken by passing cars. Chrysanthemums were coming into bloom. Yellowing squash vines swamped the vegetable gardens and tomato plants hung from their stakes, depleted with bearing. Another summer in Gilead. Gilead, dreaming out its curse of sameness, somnolence. How could anyone want to live here? That was the quesiton they asked one another, out of their father’s hearing, when they came back from college, or from the world. Why would anyone stay here?
In college all of them had studied the putative effects of deracination, which were angst and anomie, those dull horrors of the modern world. They had been examined on the subject, had rehearsed bleak and portentous philosophies in term papers, and they had done it with the earnest suspension of doubt that afflicts the highly educable. And then their return to the pays natal, where the same old willows swept the same ragged lawns, where the same old prairie arose and bloomed as negligence permitted. Home. What kinder place could there be on earth, and why did it seem to them all like exile? Oh, to be passing anonymously through an impersonal landscape! Oh, not to know every stump and stone, not to remember the fields of Queen Anne’s lace figured in the childish happiness they had offered to their father’s hopes, God bless him.
This took me back to the magical work of Willa Cather, and not just because of the repeated “Oh!”
I believe Gilead is still the better book, still the one people should read. But Home is the worthy successor. I highly recommend reading it second — I’m not sure I believe those who say you can read them in either order. I think the perspective gained in Gilead, the voice of John Ames, is important to the structure of Home. But, Home – this is a magical literary connection to America’s own past, her own home. Perhaps it’s not a home we want to go back to, but I think many of us feel that sense of angst and anomie.
I have put off reading this book for years. It’s not that it didn’t interest me. On the contrary, I’ve pulled it off the shelf many times. But I always put it back, knowing I would get to it someday. Well, after reading and loving Marilynne Robinson’s first novel Housekeeping, and now that her third novel Home was a finalist for the National Book Award and now the National Book Critics Circle Award, the time has arrived. It helped, by the way, that Gilead (2004; Pulitzer) is also one of newly inaugurated President Obama’s favorites.
If you’re a grown man when you read this – it is my intention for this letter that you will read it then – I’ll have been gone a long time. I’ll know most of what there is to know about being dead, but I’ll probably keep it to myself. That seems to be the way of things.
Those are the words of Robinson’s exquisite narrator, John Ames, to his almost seven-year-old (nameless) son, his only living offspring (more than half a life ago he had a wife who died giving birth to his daughter who also died). Thus begins one of the most complex and well-crafted narrative structures I’ve ever seen, a structure where the various segments interact with one another. Born in 1880, he’s lived his whole life in Gilead, Iowa, which looks “like whatever hoe becomes after it begins to weary a little, then weary a little more.” Ames is now dying of old age – he’s nearly 77 years old. As you can see, he’s come to his family very late in life and, feeling blessed, regrets all the same that he will never live to see a child of his grow old. So he’s taking the time to write this journal as a sort of letter across the decades for his son when he’s grown.
Ames is a Congregationalist minister, as were his father and grandfather before him. As he writes for his son, Ames uses the journal to teach but also to reflect and sort out his own life, at times frustrated by his own inability to express what he wants:
I have tried to keep the Gospel before me as a standard for my life and my preaching. And yet there I was trying to write a sermon, when all I really wanted to do was try to remember a young woman’s face.
Knowing he can’t have much longer, he begins the book preoccupied with death. But even while Ames expresses a subdued anxiety about his death, he wants to teach his son a few lessons that might be important to learn from a father were he able to live long enough to teach them. Of particular importance to Ames is teaching his son of the value of the individual. As he’s interacted with his flock through the decades, Ames has come to realize the vast depth in each being:
That’s the strangest thing about this life, about being in the ministry. People change the subject when they see you coming. And then sometimes those very same people come into your study and tell you the most remarkable things. There’s a lot under the surface of live, everyone knows that. A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you wouldn’t really expect to find it, either.
. . . .
When people come to speak to me, whatever they say, I am struck by a kind of incandescences in them, the “I” whose predicate can be “love” or “fear” or “want,” and whose object can be “someone” or “nothing” and it won’t really matter, because the loveliness is just in that presence, shaped around “I” like a flame on a wick, emanating itself in grief and guilt and joy and whatever else.
While speaking to and of his young son, Ames finds it easy to express pure love for his son’s existence (“You see how it is godlike to love the being of someone. Your existence is a delight to us.”). He has no need to question his young son’s goodness. Though he tells his son he will love him absolutely, no matter what he does in his later life, Ames fully expects his son to turn out to be an upstanding individual.
However, as the book progresses we learn of Ames’s best friend, Old Boughton, a Presbyterian minister. They grew up together and now both are suffering the last years of their lives (“Jesus never had to be old,” says Boughton). Boughton’s family has grown old around him. His wife is dead, and his children have all grown up and have all moved away except for Glory, who has come home to watch after her dying father.
Every once in a while in the letter/journal, Ames brings up one of his and Boughton’s supreme disappointments: John Ames “Jack” Boughton, Boughton’s son and Ames’s godson. Jack was an awful child who, for all we know, grew into an awful adult. He’s a drunk, and he hasn’t been around for years. But about halfway through the narrative Jack returns home (incidentally, this is also the topic of Robinson’s new book Home).
Smoothly, Ames’s journal shifts from being a predominantly an epistle to his son to his own reflections on this failed “son.” At first Ames’s doesn’t want to tell too much because, after all, his young son does not need to know everything. However, the letter becomes for Ames a way of understanding his own self even as he attempts to convey that self to his child. Ames’s detests Jack. He can’t stand the fact that though he’s been such a disappointment, Jack remains Boughton’s favorite child, a son who brings so much pain but whom Boughton forgives again and again. Ames struggles to find a way out of his resentment, out of his jealousy, out of his basic hatred. Worse, Ames’s wife and son have taken to Jack and Ames doesn’t know how to warn them off.
The truth is, as I stood there in the pulpit, looking down on the three of you, you looked to me like a handsome young family, and my evil old heart rose within me, the old covetise I have mentioned elsewhere came over me, and I felt the way I used to feel when the beauty of other lives was a misery and and offense to me. And I felt as if I were looking back from the grave.
This novel is fantastically complex in the way Robinson layers one father/son relationship on top of another, all to explore the vast landscape of those relationships: the love, the disappointment from father and from son, the need to be close and the need to be separated. Further, it’s brilliant how well Robinson juxtaposes Ames’s preaching about how to have godly love by recognizing merely the miracle of someone’s existence with Ames’s own hatred of this one individual who still calls him Papa.
After reading Housekeeping and now Gilead, I place Robinson in the forefront of American authors. Her collection of novels may be sparse, but in them lies more material than in a lifetime of work from many of the most prolific authors. Her writing skill is matched by her insights into the human condition, both from a spiritual perspective and from a purely humanistic perspective. This is not a polemic. Robinson is not preaching here through the voice of her preacher. While the Biblical story of the Prodigal Son is an obvious subtext, belief in divinity of any sort is not necessary to enjoy what this book has to offer. It’s a brilliant character study, and John Ames and Jack Boughton are incredibly well drawn. Furthermore, the aesthetics of Robinson’s limpid prose - it’s a rare treat to have form and substance and the weight of a cultural past all packed together in diction.
I’ll leave you with one more thought from Ames (I couldn’t resist):
Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable – which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.
I hadn’t heard of Marilynne Robinson (a fellow native Idahoan) until sometime in 2004 or 2005 when she won the Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle Award for her second novel Gilead. That I had never heard of her, despite our stepping into this world in the same state, is understandable: between Gilead and her first novel Housekeeping (1980) was a span of twenty-four years. For some reason, I still haven’t gotten around to reading Gilead though I’ve picked it up a few times. Now that her third book Home is a finalist for this year’s National Book Award, I thought it was time to go back the beginning and work my way through Robinson’s short (but definitely not inconsequential) oeuvre.
Housekeeping won the PEN/Hemingway Award, an award given to a work of first work of fiction by an American author. It was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1982, the year Rabbit Is Rich won. Compared to the other first novels I’ve read this year, Housekeeping is hands-down the best. In fact, it may be one of the best books I’ve read in years by any author. I’ll soon be making my way through Gilead and Home, and if they follow this vein, I’ll put Robinson in the first-tier of American authors.
Our narrator is Ruth, whose sad and strange childhood we will hear about. In the first chapter (a chapter that had as much content and characterization as many novels) we meet our narrator’s heritage. Her grandfather and grandmother lived in Fingerbone, a small western town with all its small town charm:
What with the lake and the railroads, and what with blizzards and floods and barn fires and forest fires and the general availability of shotguns and bear traps and homemade liquor and dynamite, what with the prevalence of loneliness and religion and the rages and ecstasies they induce, and the closeness of families, violence was inevitable.
Ruth’s grandfather is killed when his train careens into the large lake, a moment that goes into the town’s lore. The grandmother then raises their three daughters on her own. Each daughter moves on to a rather tragic life with terrible men. Ruth’s mother Helen is not the exception, and she manages to bring two daughters of her own, Ruth and Lucille, into this marriage. Eventually Helen borrows a neighbor’s car, drives Ruth and Lucille to Fingerbone, and leaves them on grandmother’s steps. Helen then drives the car into the lake, another event that is long remembered in Fingerbone. The grandmother takes in the two abandoned girls and tries to set up a nice home for them.
Yes, all of this is in the first short chapter, but it feels much more substantial than such a short chapter is usually capable of. As the story continues, the grandmother cannot hang on to life. Her two comical, elderly sisters, Lily and Nona, come to try their bumbling hands with Ruth and Lucille.
Their alarm was evident from the first, in the nervous flutter with which they searched their bags and pockets for the little present they had brought (it was a large box of cough drops – a confection they considered both tasty and salubrious).
When Lily and Nona realize they cannot raise the two young girls (not that they were ever comfortable with the idea of leaving their nice home in Spokane), they send for Sylvie, Helen’s transient sister. Sylvie comes and agrees to stay, though Ruth and Lucille expect her to leave any day. And this is the setup for a strange and touching story about the relationship between Ruth, Lucille, and their eccentric aunt Sylvie.
Never having been a young girl, I can’t speak for the accuracy of the coming of age elements in the story, but they felt real to me. As they grow up, Ruth and Lucille go down different paths. Ruth accepts their past for what it was. Lucille can’t.
. . . and sometimes we would try to remember our mother, though more and more we disagreed and even quarreled about what she had been like. Lucille’s mother was orderly, vigorous, and sensible, a widow (more than I ever knew or she could prove) who was killed in an accident. My mother presided over a life so strictly simple and circumscibed that it could not have made any significant demands on her attention. She tended us with a gentle indifference that made me feel she would have liked to have been even more alone – she was the abandoner, and not the one abandoned.
Worse, Lucille cannot accept Sylvie, who with her remoteness and tendency to disappear, constantly intimating abandonment, represents everything Lucille is trying to escape. Furthermore, it’s getting embarrassing. The house begins to fall into disrepair, and everyone is worried because Ruth seems to accept too easily Sylvie’s habits.
Robinson’s tone thoughout strikes the right note for me. Somehow she injects into her prose the atmosphere of Fingerbone, with its foggy lake, along with the transiency of the characters. Though the town remains in place, it always seems to be drifting away into the past. At the same time, the past does not disappear – the lake remains, and somewhere down there is a wrecked train and car.
Another reason I liked the book is because of Robinson’s control of her imagery. Throughout, Robinson plays with water and fire to create a very interesting feel – for example, “It was blocked, in fact by a big green couch so weighty and shapeless that it looked as if it had been hoisted out of forty feet of water.” - but it never, to me, was heavy handed. Obviously such imagery is Biblical, as is much of the imagery in the book, bringing to mind some excellent classics, but never does she do more than allude to religion. I’m anxious to see how she moves from this to her more overtly religious novels.
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