Review: Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson

Review: Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson

by Rich Horton

This is the first novel I read by Marilynne Robinson, which I suspect is true for many readers. Shortly before it appeared, in 2004, I read an excerpt from this novel in the New Yorker and was quite taken by it. Otherwise I might not have read the full book, though perhaps the praise of it by friends like Greg Feeley would have persuaded me. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Best Fiction of 2004, but I have a tendency to dismiss Pulitzer winners. (No doubt I am partly influenced by the common mistrust of genre readers for mainstream literary awards (though I've tended to like the Bookers), also I am influenced by a book I read long ago criticizing the first few decades of Pulitzer fiction choices.) The clincher was when I saw a friend of mine from church reading the book, a friend with whom I have traded the occasional book in the past (The Time Traveler's Wife, for instance, and Jasper Fforde's novels). She lent me the book on finishing it -- so I had to read it! And a good thing, too. To cap this discursive little paragraph, just a bit later I saw a copy of the New York Times with a profile of a reader's club, in which they cited five favorites (including The Time Traveler's Wife) and 4 books they disliked. One of these latter was Gilead ("watching paint dry") but I was heartened that another they disliked was The Master and Margarita, which I think is a spectacular novel.

I will add that after reading Gilead I of course continued to her only other novel then published -- Housekeeping, from 1980. And I will tell you that it is very different from Gilead -- and, for me, it is even better. It is one of my favorite novels of the 20th Century. Robinson has gone on to publish three further novels, each very closely related to Gilead: Home, Lila, and Jack. And of these I think Home is also magnificent, and I'd rate it too as better than Gilead. Which is only to say that Robinson truly is a great writer, to have written three such remarkable novels. (And the other two are also strong, though to me not quite at the level of the first three.)

Gilead is presented as a long series of letters from a man to his son. The letters are intended to be read after the man dies, and after the son is an adult. The letter writer is John Ames, a pastor in the small town of Gilead, Iowa, near the Kansas border. John Ames is an old man, 76 as the book opens (in 1956), and he has heart problems and doesn't expect to live long. He married very late in life to a much younger woman, and his son at the time of writing is only 7. In part the letters are an attempt to replace the years of fathering he guiltily feels he is depriving his son by his expected death.

John Ames is the son and grandson of preachers of the same name. His grandfather was a fiery abolitionist, an associate of John Brown, who came to Gilead as a Free Soiler, and who maintained in "Radical Iowa" a safe house for Brown and other abolitionist fighters and too for escaped slaves. The middle John Ames, by contrast, was a pacifist, who fought in the Civil War but was disgusted by it. Each pair of father and son became estranged -- the grandfather eventually returning to Kansas in the 1890s to preach and soon die. The estrangement between John Ames's father and himself is never clearly explained -- there is reference to a letter from father to son which the son burned, and a hint that the father may have lost his faith, or may have been simply offended by his son's refusal to ever move from Gilead.

But I digress. The letters from the younger John Ames to his son are partly a mixture of meditations on such subjects as the joys and disappointments of life, the life of a pastor, and theology. That doesn't seem like a novel, and perhaps if that's all the book was it wouldn't be a novel. (Though it could still be very enjoyable.) But the letters also tell stories, mainly on two subjects. One is the eldest John Ames, the wild abolitionist grandfather, who would steal from the collection plate in order to give money to the poor, and who apparently shot and possibly killed a Federal soldier to save John Brown from capture, and who had visions of Jesus coming and talking to him face to face. The other is Jack Boughton, John Ames Boughton, the ne'er-do-well son of the younger John Ames's best friend, a fellow pastor. Jack Boughton returns to Gilead from St. Louis during the book, but John Ames is suspicious of him, partly because of his dishonorable past actions, and partly because he seems to be just a bit too nice to John's wife, who is Jack's age, and to John's son, with whom Jack is able to play in a way that now frail John cannot. But Jack's story is more complex than John Ames first understands, and he presents John with a problem of faith, forgiveness, and honesty. As well as closing the novel with an involving story that resonates well with the historical motivations of John's grandfather.

The novel, then, is profoundly a moral meditation. At times it concerns the moral tug between pacifism and just causes such as ending slavery. At times it deals with this country's racial history. At times it concerns the responsibilities of parents to children, or of pastor to flock. At times it is, quite beautifully, a celebration of the wonders of life, and of the beauty of very simple things. Sometimes it is a love letter to a son and a wife. To an extent it is a depiction of life in a small town in American in the 1950s -- and earlier. And it is very much a religious novel, and concerned with the John Ames's sincere and humanistic religious beliefs. Ames's voice is wonderfully maintained. The prose is just remarkable, very balanced and measured, not spare but not ornate, and quite often striking without any sense of showiness. A great novel, I think, or at any rate a novel that over time will be a candidate for "greatness".