Robinson revisits ‘Gilead’ in ‘Home’
“Home”
by Marilynne Robinson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 336 pages, $25)
Pacific Northwest readers were early adopters of the work of Marilynne Robinson; the Sandpoint native’s breakout novel, 1980’s “Housekeeping,” was set in a small Idaho town.
When Robinson won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for her deeply spiritual “Gilead,” it was a pleasure and a vindication for readers who had championed “Housekeeping” as one of the best novels of the 20th century.
Now Robinson has written “Home,” which tells the story of “Gilead” in a different voice.
“Gilead” was written as the testament of John Ames, a small-town Iowa preacher, in the form of a letter to his 6-year-old son, to be read after Ames was gone and his son grown. Ames wrote of his love of and estrangement from family members, of a lifetime of pondering the nature of God and of the return to Gilead of a man who had been a trial and a tribulation to him: Jack Boughton.
“Home” revisits this time (1956) and place, but from the perspective of Boughton and his sister Glory, a 38-year-old woman in the wake of a failed romance, who has come home to take care of her dying father, the Rev. Boughton, Ames’ best friend. Jack has returned after two decades of silence and separation from his family.
The Rev. Boughton’s biggest failure is Jack, and one of Jack’s biggest regrets is the pain he has caused his father. When Jack returns, father and son commence an excruciating attempt to reconcile.
Few other characters intrude, creating a sense of compression and emotional claustrophobia heightened by the fact that this is a preacher’s family, and the issue of “what will everyone think?” is never far from the front porch.
One of “Home’s” pleasures is watching Glory and Jack rediscover each other after years of separation and misunderstanding. Each possesses a wry, almost mordant sense of humor; for such a serious writer, Robinson can be very funny.
But “Home” has more serious aims, and they’re centered on the Rev. Boughton. In decline, he still speaks with two voices: that of a loving father, and the voice of a God taking the measure of lives fallen short of perfection.
He says some terrible things to Jack, and Jack comes close to exacting a terrible retribution. Toward the end, the Reverend and Glory have this interchange, with Jack as witness:
“Glory said, ’It’s been hard for him to come here. You should be kinder to him.’
“A moment passed, and her father stirred from his reverie. ’Kinder to him! I thanked God for him every day of his life, no matter how much grief, how much sorrow – and at the end of it all there is only more grief, more sorrow, and his life will go on that way, no help for it now. 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 protect. And if the child becomes a man who has no respect for himself, it’s just destroyed till you can hardly remember what it was …”
Robinson is a practicing Congregationalist mightily concerned with issues of spirituality, philosophy and religion. My take on “Home” is that it is her meditation on the difficulty of bringing together two key tenets of Christianity: the imperative to judge, and the need to forgive.
The Rev. Boughton is determined to both enfold his son in love’s embrace and save his soul. He judges Jack – minute by minute, day by day, year by year – and yet he tells himself continually he must forgive. How can these two impulses reside peaceably within the same heart, and how does love fit in?
With great difficulty, Robinson may be saying, requiring a greater magnanimity – grace, if you will – than we mere humans are likely to possess.