With Gilead (2004), Home (2008) and Lila (2014) Marilynne Robinson has produced a body of work of a quality unparalleled in modern fiction, I believe. The first two novels deal with the anxieties and hopes of John Ames and Robert Boughton, old clergymen in the small, fictional Iowan town of Gilead in the 1950s, the latest with the early life of Lila Dahl, Ames’s wife.
One reason for the success of these novels may be that their settings of- fer the reader the consolation of distance. The Cold War (with its tense race relations) and the hardscrabble 1930s are settings which to us, with our increasingly dysfunctional world view, seem comparatively innocent. A further consolation surely is that, given the way the author treats her thematic concerns, the Gilead novels read like religious texts – at least for sympathetic non-believers. Robinson would take exception to this no doubt, arguing as she does in an illuminating interview in The Paris Review (No. 198): ‘It seems to me that anything that is written compassionately and perceptively probably satisfies every definition of religious whether a writer intends it to be religious or not.’ Robinson approached a similar idea from a Christian perspective in The Death of Adam (2005) where she wrote that ‘humanism clearly rested on the idea that people have souls, and that they have certain obligations to them, and certain pleasures in them, which arise from their refinement or their expression in art.’
The Gilead novels certainly cause us to revive that grand old humanistic claim that Literature trains our moral feelings. Nowadays it is fashionable to debunk the notion of art as humanising, a kind of moral education. This is not to be confused with the moral education of characters in, say, a Henry James novel, but a refining of the reader’s senses. ‘Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man’, as Shelley phrased it. Even as relatively recently as 1948, in his essay ‘Manners, Morals, and the Novel’, the highly influential American critic Lionel Trilling could write of the novel as ‘involving the reader himself in the moral life, invit- ing him to put his own motives under examination’. Clearly novels are not always there to enlarge our sympathies. Yet some are.
Character, however is the key. The extraordinary success of the Gilead novels and the warmth of reader response are testimony to the goodness and frailty of the characters in their explorations of mortality, grace and forgiveness (‘the posture of grace’). In that same Paris Review interview Robinson wrote, ‘I feel strongly that action is generated out of character. And I don’t give anything a higher priority than character. The one consist- ent thing among my novels is that there’s a character who stays in my mind. It’s a character with complexity that I want to know better.’
Identification with the characters is made easier for readers by the construc- tion of the three novels. The events of the first two happen simultaneously, seen from different perspectives. Gilead is effectively a monologue deliv- ered by John Ames while Home is constructed largely of dialogue between the failing Robert Boughton and two of his disappointed children, Glory and Jack. In Gilead and Home a homecoming is central, while Lila focuses on an arrival. This most recent novel follows the painful upbringing of its eponymous character from the 1930s to the early days of her marriage, taking its departure, perhaps, from Ames’s remark in the first of the three novels ‘that you never do know the actual nature even of your own experi- ence. Or perhaps it has no fixed and certain nature.’
The Congregational minister John Ames is Marilynne Robinson’s central figure, the narrator of the first novel and a key presence in the others. (Is it too much to see in his name a pun on the sense of ‘striving toward’?). He has lived his long life in Gilead, which is like other nondescript towns in the area having been ‘set up in the heat of an old urgency’ (at the time of Abolitionism and the Civil War). Ames is aware that even this town has had its heroes, saints and martyrs, like the father and grandfather he is named after. At the time of the novel, ‘aside from farming, there’s the grocery
store and the dry-goods store and the barbershop and the gas station and the bank’. Unlike his father and grandfather, both pastors who finally left the town, Ames has refused to escape, accepting ‘the limits of notions that were very old and even very local.’
Like his namesake, the Evangelist John, the one long-lived Apostle, Ames has lived to an age. He is ‘beautiful for an old man,’ according to Lila, though ‘He looked as if he’d had his share of loneliness’. Now seventy- seven and with a weak heart he has been blessed by his late marriage to Lila and the arrival of a child, Robbie, and yet his joy is clouded by fear for their future and guilt at not having saved the little money he ever had. Gilead is his testimony. What begins as an attempt to write a series of letters to his young son to be read in future years – his family history (his ‘begats’) and some necessary precepts – becomes a painful exploration of conscience and fear, as well as a love poem to Lila. By the end of the novel the experi- ence of recounting has been humbling for the reader and consolatory for this deeply virtuous man, who can write, ‘I have been drawn back into this world in the course of it. The expectation of death I began with reads like a kind of youthfulness, it seems to me now.’
The pastor has the strength of his calling. He has loved the life of the min- istry and is shrewdly life-affirming (‘I have been thinking about existence lately. In fact, I have been so full of admiration for existence that I have hardly been able to enjoy it properly’). He has seen personal tragedy, hav- ing early lost his first wife, Louisa, and their daughter, Rebecca. Yet Glory tells Jack in Home that with his second marriage Ames is ‘not as abstracted as he used to be. So much of that was loneliness’. Over the long years he has rightly earned a ‘great reputation for wisdom’, though typically he puts it down to his book buying and the nights he only appears to have been up late studying. The books inspired the sermons – enough to fill two-hundred and twenty-five books he tells us – which he wrote and kept and now weigh on his spirits.
Ames has also lost a precocious older brother, Edward, a man who scandalized the community by returning as an atheist after the church had sent him to Germany to study. However, Ames remains a conservative, a Re- publican. His conservatism perhaps explains his reluctance to leave Gilead as well as his attachment to the memory of his grandfather, something of an Old Testament prophet, ‘just afire with old certainties’ who thought ‘we should all be living at a dead run’. A Civil War veteran prompted by fiery Abolitionist principles, the grandfather ‘had preached his people into the war’, where he killed a man and lost an eye in the fighting. Later, knowing ‘he couldn’t preach life back into a church’ that had lost so much, he hired himself out as an odd job man. A man subject to visions, he finally left the family in pursuit of his ministry, dying in a ‘godforsaken’ place where his son and the young Ames travelled in great hardship to find his grave.
‘I believe the old reverend’s errors were mainly the consequence of a sort of strenuousness in ethical matters that was to be admired finally’, Ames tells us. He believes he himself is given too much respect and that his life ‘does not compare with grandfather’s’. The old man nevertheless provides Gilead with some real comic moments. In his belief that the Lord will pro- vide, he habitually gives away almost anything of value he can find in his son’s house, in defiance of Ames’ mother who on one memorable occasion ‘stares him out’. The old man also provides an easy, conspiratorial imper- sonation for Ames and his mother with the closing of an eye.
The general view seems to be that the old man was ‘crazy’. His own son John, Ames’s father, hardly shared Ames’s tolerance for the wilful behav- iour, though in later life he felt guilt about reverting to Quaker meetings in response to the old man’s martial spirit. Ames’s father was another man of principle who we learn disappointed some of his congregation at times, including his son, in the way he ‘acted from faithfulness to the truth as he saw it’. He in turn was disappointed in his son. Finally the father, who many years earlier had broken with his other son, Edward, in old age breaks with Gilead and goes to live in Florida with his wife, urging Ames to leave as well.
The great friend of Ames’s life is Robert Boughton, a Presbyterian minister slightly younger but in even worse health than Ames, dubbed his ‘alter ego’
by Boughton’s daughter Glory. It is Boughton’s ‘habit to consider Ames another self, for most purposes’. Home deals with the crises in the lives of two of his children. Marilynne Robinson returned to writing about them in this novel, because ‘With Jack and old Boughton especially, and with Glory also, I felt like there were whole characters that had not been fully realized in Ames’s story. I couldn’t really see the point in abandoning them.’
Boughton is a widower with little time left to him. He is ten years retired from the church and is now being looked after by his daughter, Glory, a teacher recovering from a failed relationship and unhappy to be driven back to ‘crickety, black Gilead’. His life is little more now than bouts of sleep, fragments of conversation, games of checkers with Ames, requests for old American hymns (a love of which he shares with his author) and keen concern for his son, Jack, whom he named after his lifelong friend.
Jack (John Ames Boughton) is a fragile vessel, a self-destructive figure, once the self-styled ‘town thief’ and now close to broken by his failure as a provider as well as by the complications that ensue from his choice of an African-American companion (plus his early abandonment of his first child). He has barely made a living since his days in Gilead. A reforming drunk, with a lifetime of petty crime, he is aware that his behaviour has always been inexplicable, even to himself. He has returned desperate for approval. ‘I’m so tired of myself’ he admits repeatedly. He is a lost soul with a comprehensive knowledge of the Bible, bitter even about his dis- reputability. Above all Jack feels powerless in his alienation (‘Sometimes it seems as though I’m in one universe and you’re in another’). The fear haunts him that he is predestined to fail, to drag down those he loves. It is in this, of course, that Jack signals his moral worth. He comes home further tortured with the fear of having been rejected by his Della, while nursing the half-formed intention of a married life in Gilead.
Jack’s sister Glory is not judgmental about him. Nor is Teddy, the doc- tor brother who has always helped. Lila, too, has a natural affinity with Jack Boughton. She recognizes his concern about the Christian doctrine of election and the allied hope that a person can change. She is also better able to empathize with him than the others. ‘Maybe some people aren’t so comfortable with themselves’, she explains to Ames in Gilead. These three see the need for forgiveness, but ironically neither his father nor Ames can see Jack clearly. Characteristically Boughton blames himself for not having been a good father to Jack. ‘I always felt it was sadness I was dealing with’ and as a consequence he failed to discipline him. Now the father is both joyful and broken-hearted at his son’s return, never able to understand him beyond the conclusion that Jack is ‘a man who has no respect for himself.’
John Ames also fails to understand his namesake’s needs. Once upon a time it was Jack’s ‘transgressions’ that set them apart: setting fire to Ames’s mail- box, painting his front steps with molasses, briefly stealing his Greek Testa- ment, his reading glasses, the photo of his late wife. And yet Ames feels guilty because Jack ‘is the beloved child of my oldest and dearest friend, who gave him to me, so to speak, to compensate for my own childishness’. He acknowledges that the harm Jack has done to him is slight but cannot forgive that he would ‘squander his fatherhood as if it were nothing.’
Jack’s often unspoken sympathy with Lila also disturbs Ames greatly. ‘Why must I always defend myself against this sad old youth? What is the harm I fear from him?’ he wonders, though in his goodness Ames sees that ‘He is someone who must be forgiven’. At root his fear is that Jack ‘will do you and your mother harm’ he writes to the boy, just ‘for the sly, unanswerable meanness of it’. Ames is equally reluctant to face the truth of his incipient jealousy. Only with Jack’s final revelations do they reach some accord and Ames’s equanimity is restored. He can pray for Jack again.
Despite the blindness of his two ‘fathers’, Jack grew up being loved at home, albeit in a bemused way. He had a kind of mystique in the family, Glory tells him, ‘we thought you were, I don’t know, chimerical, piratical, mercurial’. They were almost afraid to touch their brother: ‘There was an aloofness about him more thoroughgoing than modesty or reticence. It was feral, and fragile.’ Even now, to Glory, his evasiveness seems ‘like an elegance in him’. The siblings form a bond in the course of the novel which is quite affecting, and though ultimately Gilead is not the place for Jack the visit revives him a little.
Home is not told from Jack’s perspective but Glory’s, since the author felt that his alienation was too complicated to make that view of events viable. Glory is a former school teacher betrayed by a lover who turned out to be married. She is a good-hearted, industrious woman and a dutiful child: ‘Faith for her was habit and family loyalty, a reverence for the Bible which was also literary, admiration for her mother and father.’ Glory is a beauti- fully realized character, as admirable as any in the Gilead novels and one of the most clear-sighted.
In the old days, when the Bougton family thrived, Glory remembers rue- fully: ‘Hope was serene, Luke was generous, Teddy was brilliant, Jack was Jack, Grace was musical, and Glory took everything to heart.’ She still reverts to tears but it is Glory who is now the strength of the reduced fam- ily, assuaging her father’s fears and offering an emotional prop to Jack. Her intimacy with her brother is rewarding to her as much as to him, for as she admits to him at one point, ‘All my life I’ve wanted your attention.’
The other central character in the Gilead novels is Lila Dahl, the catalyst for Gilead, a sympathetic but marginal voice in Home and the protagonist of Lila. In Home Lila’s uneducated, comfortable voice suggested ‘that she knew a good deal more about the world than she would ever let on’. In Lila, Marilynne Robinson decided to tell us. She is an unwanted, abused child rescued during the Depression years by Doll, a damaged vagrant herself who joins a group of itinerant workers led by a man named Doane. Lila is a child of the kind of neglect that Ames would hardly have encountered in his life. Hers is less stable even than the poor young woman Jack made pregnant and abandoned. Of Lila, Robinson writes, ‘She had never been at home in all the years of her life’. She struggles through her formative years with courage, with as keen an experience of the land and the seasons as she has of poverty. Even as a married woman we learn, ‘Her hands still smelled like river water, and her hair. She still felt a little more like who she was.’
The years before Gilead had been hard and when Lila loses Doll she be- comes involved in prostitution. By the time she arrives in Gilead, having hitched her way out of New Orleans, she is living rough and enters Ames’s church warily, attracted by the candles and human warmth. ‘Unschooled in scripture’ but naturally intelligent, Lila instantly attracts the old minister, who begins to look out for her. Though ‘He was an old preacher and she was a field hand’ their relationship develops almost instantly. His awk- ward courtesies and care are amusing but welcome. He considers himself blessed to meet Lila, hearing in her voice ‘an unfathomable grace’. Equally Boughton ‘sensed a wistfulness in Ames as often as he was reminded of all the unknowable life his wife had lived and would live without him.’
Lila is inevitably more pragmatic, taking nothing for granted about her fortunes. She may come as a shock to some readers, her frankness miscon- strued as irreverence to Ames. In their early Gilead days (covered only in Lila) she always thinks of him as ‘the old man’ and is unillusioned about their prospects, since ‘Old men are hard to keep’ and her husband has a weak heart. She is described as being merely ‘glad there was a time in her life when she could rest up for whatever was going to happen to her next’. However her pregnancy complicates things. She stays and with the years relaxes a little, though always we suspect she is keeping the counsel she gives herself near the end of Lila: ‘She couldn’t lean her whole weight on any of this when she knew she would have to live on after it. She wouldn’t even want to see this house again after they left it, or Gilead.’ When we meet her in Home, several years after her arrival, it is only her plucked eyebrows that give ‘a suggestion of former worldliness at odds with her stalwartly maternal frame.’
To admirers of the novels it is finally reassuring that Lila has found more than a brief, temporary home with the pastor. Like many I have real af- fection for the Ames of Gilead, as I have for Glory and the human drama captured in the heartbreaking dialogue of Home. The new book, Lila, is treasurable both for the character and for the glimpse it gives us into a hard world we would otherwise have missed from our porch in that town.
In the essay quoted earlier, ‘A Defence of Poetry’ (1821), Shelley wrote: ‘The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, ac-
tion, or person, not our own.’ This is the secret Marilynne Robinson shares in her wonderfully written Gilead novels which together constitute, for this reader at least, The Great American Novel of our time.