Marilynne Robinson's new novel brings readers back to Gilead

By Jenny Shank, Special to the Rocky

Published September 4, 2008 at 7 p.m.

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Marilynne Robinson's 2004 novel Gilead was the graceful tale of John Ames, an elderly Congregationalist preacher in a small Iowa town, writing down advice and recollections for his young son. Ames' long letter was imbued with his awareness that he would not live to see his son grow up.

Twenty-four years had elapsed between the publication of Gilead and Robinson's well-loved first novel, Housekeeping, and her second novel, with its timeless quality, flawless prose, and reverence for quiet contemplation, was greeted with enormous praise, winning the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Robinson has returned to the town of Gilead for her understated - some would say muted - new novel, Home, but instead of picking up after Ames' death, as readers might expect, it's concurrent with Gilead, exploring the family of John Ames' best friend, the Presbyterian minister Robert Boughton.

Boughton's 38-year-old daughter, Glory, the youngest of his eight children, has moved back home to Gilead to care for her ailing father. Glory, who reflects that "she was good in the fullest and narrowest sense of the word as it is applied to female children," had been a schoolteacher but seems to welcome the escape that returning home provides in the wake of a relationship gone sour. Still, she rebukes herself for her situation: "It is as if I had a dream of adult life and woke up from it, still here in my parents' house."

She passes her days feeding and caring for her father and the house, listening to classical music on the radio, and reading the Bible and other books. Her stagnant if dutiful life can well use the shaking up that comes when her "scoundrel brother" Jack, the prodigal son featured in Gilead, sends word that he is coming home after an absence of 20 years, and eventually makes good on that promise and turns up at the door.

In their joy to see Jack again, Glory and her father are cautious in their interactions with him, treating him like a skittish colt, avoiding mention of the incident that precipitated his leaving - he'd impregnated a lower-class neighbor girl - and preventing themselves from asking questions about what had gone on in his life during his two-decade absence, or about the letters he writes every day.

Although the prose is beautiful, Home in its early going is glacial in pace, in part because of the characters' reticence with each other over matters of real import. They have long conversations about life and scripture that do little to advance the story except to display the Boughton family's uncommon eloquence.

Robinson does an expert job of portraying the natural difficulty that estranged members of a family have in opening up to each other, but it can be a slog for the reader. There are many descriptions of what Glory prepares for dinner and the grooming rituals of both men. They apologize when they interrupt each other's reading, and are unfailingly polite. "Not much happens around here," Glory explains to Jack when she and her father grow overexcited about caring for a splinter Jack acquired, and she isn't lying.

The book would be livelier if it ever followed Jack on his occasional relapses into drunken carousing; all the bad things Jack does and his conflicts with Ames occur offstage, and are mentioned obliquely, if at all.

Instead, the narrative resolutely sticks to the dutiful goodness going on at home. This passage is typical: "The day seemed to be passing in the way that had become customary, Glory tending to household things while her father slept and Jack made himself useful around the place, making small, patient inroads on dishevelment and disrepair."

The first half of Home doesn't live up to Gilead, missing the occasionally cantankerous voice of John Ames (who turns up only in brief cameos), and teasing out the mysteries behind Jack and Glory's lives too slowly. ("Mystery" is a relative term in this case - I was able to guess the secret behind Jack's estranged lady love immediately after she was introduced.)

The second half, however, gains power and momentum as important occurrences begin to happen and the characters finally delve into their past wounds and grievances. The scripture-infused prose soars, just as it did in Gilead, and there are many moving moments in which the characters bare their hearts to each other, such as when Boughton reflects on what anguish Jack's bad ways and absence caused him: "I thanked God for him every day of his life, no matter how much grief, how much sorrow. . . . You see something beautiful in a child, and you almost live for it, you feel as though you would die for it, but it isn't yours to keep or to protect."

Gilead was a quiet novel and Home is even further hushed, but in the end shares in its predecessor's redemptive grace.

Jenny Shank's fiction has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review and other journals. She writes about books for NewWest.net and lives in Boulder.

Home

* By Marilynne Robinson. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 336 pages, $25 .

* Grade: B

Enduring friends

Explaining her inspiration for Home recently, Robinson noted that after she finished her acclaimed novel, Gilead, "the characters didn't go away (in my mind). Why not give them another book?"

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