Gilead
& Home by Marilynne Robinson
Over the weeks it has taken
me to read and devour them, I have grown quite fond of two works by a Pulitzer
Prize-winning novelist named Marilynn Robinson.
They are concerned with life during the 1950s in a very small placid Iowa
town (named Gilead) somewhat remote and sheltered from the busy world of social
ferment and change going on hundreds of miles away. But they are alive, ever so pleasingly alive,
with characters so real and so commonplace and so wonderfully developed that it
is difficult at times to believe that they are fictional creations. Surely they must walk the path that many in
small town America have traversed over the length of its days, and Robinson
quietly celebrates their simple faith, struggle and frail heroism.
The curious fact about
these two sparely composed pieces – “Gilead” and “Home” (not to be confused
with a novel having the exact same title recently published by Toni Morrison) –
is their interrelation. They both
address the same human environment but from different points of view. “Gilead” is not in the truest sense of the
term a novel. It is a journal containing
scores of anecdotes. A
seventy-four-year-old Congregationalist pastor named John Ames is suffering
from a terminal illness, with only weeks or months at most to live, and is
spewing forth reams of secretive writing meant only to be read by Robby, his
seven-year-old son, when he becomes a grown man. Because of the boy’s late, late arrival in
Ames’ life (this clergyman having lost his first wife by an untimely death and
remarried) he will not experience his father in the flesh during most of his
formative years. Ames is afraid he will
not remember enough about the man who sired him or the family background the
two of them share. By this rambling posthumous
correspondence he takes the boy-to-become-a-man-someday back as far as the
Civil War, in which the boy’s great grandfather played a big part. The anecdotes he lays out, covering all the
years since, are for the most part quite curious, funny and filled with quirky
happenings. He does not preach to the
boy or talk down to him; this minister is not a staunch evangelical trying to
indoctrinate, rather more of a humanist in the language he uses and a great
lover of life. He even assures the boy
in one place that he is not a saint, and his personality embodied in his profusion
of words is anything but saintly. He in
fact opens up much more on paper to his son than he has ever been able to do
face to face due to the vast age gap. We
are left hoping that Robby will someday read it and take it to heart.
A noticeable factor in
Ames’ life and one he shares much about in his journaling is the family of a
fellow clergyman, a Rev. Boughton, a staunch Presbyterian, a very dear friend from
childhood and a fellow cleric, and Boughton’s somewhat prodigal son Jack with
whom Ames has had an irksome acquaintance in years past and about whom Ames
retains mixed feelings. It seems Jack
once brought scandal into his own family and the small town by his siring of an
out-of-wedlock daughter whom he never publicly acknowledged to be his before
she died within the first few years of her life – which brings me to the other
book, “Home,” a novel, unlike “Gilead,” in every sense of the word and much
more bitter sweet.
“Home” takes us inside the
Boughton family and traces the course of personal relations over the same time
period. In “Home” Ames is a supporting
player, who only puts in three brief appearances in its pages, though he
inadvertently catalyzes an emotional crisis in the Boughton household, one of
which he is never told, at least not in the scope of either of these books. (Robinson’s characters are rarely
confrontational with each other.) The
narrative of “Home” is constructed not from the widowed Rev. Boughton’s point
of view but from that of his thirty-eight-year-old unmarried daughter Glory,
who has quit her teaching job in another locality and moved in with him, now
that he is retired from the local pastorate and is, like Ames his neighbor, in
failing health. Glory literally takes
the place of her deceased mother who was expected to be her husband’s
caretaker. She cooks and cleans for him and
nurses him full time, anticipating his death, with plans to be gone after he is
dead.
Glory is the youngest of
several children, too young to remember much about her older brother Jack, who
left home after high school when Glory was still a child and has not been heard
from for an entire twenty years. As it
so happens, Jack the prodigal returns to his father’s house early in the book,
only to find Glory his kid sister, practically a stranger to him, running
things. The delicate ménage in which
sister, brother and their father are forced to engage is the essence of the
story and the source of this novel’s subtly provocative power and charm, with a
little of the mysterious into the bargain.
At first Glory fears her brother, a very reclusive, emotionally timid,
guilt-prone and inscrutable man who is stingy with information about what he has
been doing for those twenty years. She also
gets drawn into the role of mother for both men and something of a mediator
between their dissimilar, mutually wary souls and temperaments. Jack does not get into heated fights with his
father; he remains respectful though distant and tentative. Fascinating things happen as the three of
them abide with each other, nothing that would make headlines anywhere in the
news world or provide heart-stopping entertainment but worthy of scrupulous
examination by the minds and hearts of all devout and spiritual individuals. Jack’s
visit does have an impact upon the home, one the reader is likely to spend much
time assaying long after the reading has been completed.
“Gilead” is written
entirely in the vernacular of Rev. Ames, actually a very well educated
man. Ms. Robinson never stands apart
from him or comments; she just lets him talk.
The novel “Home,” on the other hand, is the kind of writing that one
cannot rush through. The character
portraits are too tightly woven and intricate for hurried reading. I do not recommend taking it on a late plane
flight when you wish to unwind with something diverting and relaxing. It will not grab you and sweep you
along. Almost each and every paragraph
is a work of literary art, scrupulously constructed and bristling with nuance,
requiring clearheaded concentration.
Many times in my reading I felt the need to stop and go back and reread
a passage, sensing that I had missed a shade or two of reflection, perhaps
something cosmically important. Those
who prefer super thrillers and fast moving action or high drama will not relish
it.
Both books were published
during the past decade – “Gilead” in 2004 and “Home” in 2008. I strongly recommend that both be read and
that “Gilead” be read first. There are
disclosures in it that will make material in “Home” much clearer in meaning
when one comes to it. Robinson’s prose in
“Home” is nothing short of exquisite.
But why should I talk about it? I
am going to conclude this review by giving a few samples and letting them speak
for themselves:
[In reference to the home
environment during Glory’s childhood] “Truth
had sharp edges and hard corners, and could be at serious odds with
kindness.”
[Glory’s assessment of her
religious heritage] “For her, church was
an airy white room with tall windows looking out on God’s good world, with
God’s sunlight pouring in through those windows and falling across the pulpit
where her father stood, straight and strong, parsing the broken heart of
humankind and praising the loving heart of Christ. That was church.”
[On the sad subject of
Glory’s apparently assured spinsterhood]
“Glory had always thought home would be a house less cluttered and
ungainly than this one [her father’s], in a town larger than Gilead, or a city,
where someone would be her intimate friend and the father of her children. .
.Then she could learn what her own tastes were, within the limits of their
means, of
course. . .She had dreamed
of a real home for herself and the babies
. . .different from this
good and blessed and fustian and oppressive tabernacle of Boughton probity and
kind intent. She knew, she had known for
years, that she would never open a door on that home, never cross that
threshold, never scoop up a pretty child and set it on her hip and feel it lean
into her breast and eye the world from her arms with the complacency of utter
trust.”
[In reference to Boughton’s
idea of devoutness] “Her father had
always said, God does not need our worship.
We worship to enlarge our sense of the holy, so that we can feel and
know the presence of the Lord, who is with us always.”
“The room was filled with
those things that seem to exist so that children can be forbidden to touch them
– porcelain windmills and pagodas and china dogs – and Robby’s eyes were bright
with suppressed attraction to them.”
“How to announce the return
of comfort and well-being except by cooking something fragrant – that is what
her mother always did. After any
calamity of any significance she would fill the atmosphere of the house with
the smell of cinnamon rolls or brownies, or with chicken and dumplings, and it
would mean, This house has a soul that loves us all, no matter what. . .You can
come down to dinner now, and no one will say a thing to bother you, unless you
have forgotten to wash your hands. And
her father would offer the grace, inevitable with minor variations, thanking
the Lord for all the wonderful faces he saw around the table.”
To read other entries in my
blog, please consult its website:
enspiritus.blogspot.com
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