At Home in Gilead

A consideration of Marilynne Robinson’s ‘Gilead’ quartet.

Hi, Y’all! Glad You’re Here—

Growing up, my Granny woke me every morning by tickling my ear and offering me a cup of heavily sugared coffee, before opening up her bible and reading a chapter or two to get us ready for the day. While she’d read the Bible every year since 1973, each time she spoke the words aloud for me, she read them as if it were her first time discovering the Lord’s teachings—her sentences were staccato, the scripture finding a new rhythm against her southern twang, and at random moments she’d come to a deeper understanding of a line or two and ponder it for herself, before letting me in on her newfound knowledge. When I once asked her why we read so early each morning (often before 6:00 AM) she quoted a line from Deuteronomy, about His teachings arriving like morning dew. And so, years later, in my mid-twenties, when I finally decided to read Marilynne Robinson, I chose to approach her work like that of the Lord’s. I woke each morning, poured myself a cup of heavily sugared coffee, and read from her work as the sun dried the grass—all with my Granny’s voice narrating it in my head.

My first encounter with Robinson was with her first novel, Housekeeping, which I read at 22, when I wasn’t quite ready. I was an impatient reader, too demanding of my books, too used to the sensationalized stories so popular now, and when she asked that I tune out the world, slow down for a time, and come with her on this journey, I resisted. I flew past every moment where Robinson observed God in everyday life, not understanding that if I had slowed down, I would have seen him too.

It wasn’t quite two years later, when, at 23, I picked up her second novel, Gilead. It’s interesting to think that my age is in perfect alignment with how many years there were between Robinson’s first and second novel’s. It took her 23 years to release another fiction, and it took me 23 years of living to finally grow enough as a reader that I understood what she was trying to say.

Gilead takes the form of a diary, that of Reverend John Ames, who—after discovering he is dying of a heart condition—decides to write an account of his life for his young son to remember him by. The novel offers a beautiful depiction of rural life in 1950’s Iowa, something akin to what Alice Munro did for Ontario, while also capturing the complicated nature of the period and setting. And more than anything, this novel operates as a deeper consideration of faith and what it means to be a person of God.

While this might sound more in the realm of “Christian Fiction”, I think what separates this work from the genre is that Robinson’s work never reads as an attempt to convert you, to save your soul. Her work operates much in the same way as a lot of other literary fiction, in that it’s exploring an aspect of the human experience. There can be this fearfulness in approaching literary works revolving around Christianity because of all of the harm that has been caused to those who’ve grown up in the Christian faith and then been shunned by it, but I never find Robinsons work manipulative or judgmental.

I don’t consider myself to be a religious person—which I know could possibly sound contrary, considering what all I’ve shared above—but having grown up in the church, having studied the Bible with my Granny for so many years, I’m deeply familiar with Christian theology. In many ways, the moments where John Ames shares his reflections feels like what the pastors I heard growing up were *trying* to say, but never seemed able to articulate. There’s a quote from early on in the novel that, when I first read it, it brought me to tears.

“The moon looks wonderful in this warm evening light, just as a candle flame looks beautiful in the light of morning. Light within light...It seems to me to be a metaphor for the human soul, the singular light within that great general light of existence.”

I remember reading this while sitting on my back porch, the sun coming up, coffee in hand. I stopped, thinking about it for a moment, the way my Granny always stopped to ponder a piece of scripture from the Bible. I had never considered existence itself to be a light, or the human soul. I don’t know how to explain it in any way other than how she communicated it in this passage—who knows, I may not fully understand it now—but I felt, for the first time, what I think my Granny must have felt when reading the word of God.

Reading Robinson’s work often feels like a more authentic version of the manufactured experience one feels while inside a well-budgeted church—it’s that moment when they ask if you feel the holy spirit, as the lights go down and the ambient music plays and people either speak in tongues or speak in whispers, depending on your denomination. For a moment, you do feel moved, the magic trick working successfully. What makes Robinson’s work so impressive is that, while she’s not attempting to save your soul, she is exploring faith in an honest way; whether we as the reader believe in God or not doesn’t matter, because what we’re moved by is the hopeful way she sees the world, the way she writes about so lovingly.

It took me a week to read Gilead—typically, a book of its length might take me an afternoon. But it was this slowing down, this deeper consideration of her thoughts and ideas that helped me to better understand it.

There are many reasons why I love Gilead, but I think the reason I love it the most is because it reminds me so much of these mornings with my Granny. When I think of my Granny, when I tell people of all of the reasons I love her, it always goes back to the memory of being woken up by her, and of her reading to me.

Soon after I finished, I moved on to the second novel in the quartet—then, trilogy—Home. Funnily enough, the first four times I started Home, I didn’t like it. I kept getting stuck around page thirty, wondering where the magic was from Gilead, feeling a bit ruffled in some ways. It took me a few more years to be ready for Robinson again.

I finally read Home, just a few weeks before moving into mine and my husband’s first house last year. I was convinced that reading a book titled Home, about people returning to their childhood homes, would sort itself into something poetic in my life—I’m always looking for symmetry between my life and the art I’m consuming, the poetry of it all. I started it on audio, listening as I folded sheets and then later as I got in the tub. I concentrated, hard, knowing that Robinson’s work demanded my full attention. While I wasn’t immediately taken with the voice, I did finally understand the rhythm of the language. I fell into the story, and eventually, I was once again consumed.

Home is a companion to Gilead, written in third person and telling the story of Jack Boughton, his father, Reverend Boughton, and his youngest sister, Glory. Glory, recently abandoned by her no-good fiancé, returns home to care for her ailing father, with Jack appearing not long after. While it’s clear that the majority of this novel is focused on the complex relationship betweeen Reverend Boughton and Jack (in a thoughtful and well executed take on the parable of the Prodigal Son), I think it’s Glory who offers us the lens with which we take in this story.

One of my favorite moments in Home is with Glory, and it happens early on.

“Faith for her was habit and family loyalty, a reverence for the Bible which was also literary, admiration for her mother and father. And then that thrilling quiet of which she had never felt any need to speak.”

I think it’s a beautiful, honest passage, and says so much about Glory as a character. The way Robinson writes of her faith is often in direct contrast with Jack, and this friction is what leads to some of the more interesting moments of discussion throughout the book.

One of the things I loved the most about this book was how it didn’t shy away from revealing the hypocrisy of people of faith. When Jack first returns to Gilead, his motivations aren’t clear—what we do know is that he’s seen as this sort of pariah, that his family and Rev Ames consider him to be a person who brings about trouble. Throughout the first part of the novel, it’s clear that Jack is working his hardest to make amends with his father. We later learn that one of the main reasons Jack returns home is because he is looking for a safe place for him and his wife, a Black woman named Della, and their young son to live. At some point, while Jack and Rev Boughton are watching the news on tv, they witness the violence enacted on black people by the police, and boughton is dismissive. He has very little concern regarding racism, and Jack is struck by this realization and he’s sickened by it, frustrated, unsure how to reconcile it.

When I read this, I was reminded of a few years back when they published the first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird, marketed as the sequel, Go Set A Watchman. That first draft is all about Scout coming to the understanding that her perfect father isn’t so perfect after all, and that he is racist and problematic. Home is more successful, partly because I think that the conversations were further along in 2008, but also because I think that Robinson isn’t asking that we forgive this man for his racism. Robinson isn’t afraid to depict the flawed nature of people of faith, to ask the hard questions and to hold her characters accountable. And with this companion novel, she makes it more clear how imperfect some of the people we’ve held up so high truly can be.

As I was reading Home, I kept thinking about the events that had been previously depicted in Gilead, and how Robinson managed to make us see things from an entirely different perspective without changing any of the events. That’s the power of this quartet, of how Robinson approaches this work. So often when we get these “new perspectives” in a story, it changes a major event in some way, or completely changes a character motivation. Robinson isn’t rewriting her fictional history, she’s just sharing more of the truth as she’s discovered it. I think any time we learn more, we begin to see things more clearly. There are books I read at 14 that, when I revisited them after having more life experience, I could understand the reasons why certain characters acted as they did, my feelings for certain characters might have changed. It made me think, this must be why my Granny often paused while reading some of these passages she’d read again and again. it wasn’t that the words had changed, but that she had learned so much more as time had gone on, that she had a greater context and a new lens with which to consider the words.

I ended up reading Lila the day after finishing Home, desperate to stay in the world of Gilead, in the words and wisdom of Marilynne Robinson. This was the book everyone predicted would be my favorite (it ranks third for me, but I also have a hard time ranking these for I love them all), and I think it’s partly due to the fact that Lila has a troubled life, and as a person who had a troubled life, I often gravitate to those books. But what I found so interesting about this book was that it reminded me of another Pulitzer-Prize winner—also a retelling, which we could argue is kin to the companion novel—March by Geraldine Brooks. That novel is a retelling of the Louisa May Alcott classic, Little Women—focusing on the father as he’s at war—and towards the end of the novel, we discover that the sweet Marmie that everyone has always thought of as endlessly patient and kind is filled with fury over some of the decisions her husband has made. We begin to see these deeper layers to her that not many readers had considered before. With this third book in the quartet, Robinson gives Lila the much needed depth and complexity we had only briefly glimpsed before.

Something else I loved about this novel was it’s emotional complexity. While all of these novels have made me cry at one point or another, this third entry in particular is so emotionally resonant, I wasn’t even prepared.

It also makes us consider Rev Ames in a new light, reframing the stories he recounted from her perspective, making us reconsider what we know of him and ask if the decisions he made we’re always in God’s favor. Robinson isn’t afraid to muddy the waters, and I enjoy that.

Lila offers us a look into what it means to be a woman of faith, but also how much conflict that carries with it.

My favorite thing about both Lila and Jack as characters is that they’re outsiders, but in many ways, they seem the most Godly of all. I think it’s a reminder that sometimes goodness isn’t always what we think it looks like.

I only recently finished the last entry, Jack, and I’m still forming my thoughts on it. It’s the one that stands out the most to me for it’s stylistic differences, I think, particularly for how dialogue heavy it is. But finishing the quartet did make me think about a lot of this stuff over the last week and I wanted to share some of these thoughts. Reading, for me, often feels like a religious experience. Every time I finish a great book, I feel this shift in the world, or I feel closer to another person, or closer to myself. I feel a deeper understanding of something I maybe didn’t understand at all before. When I read Marilynne Robinson, I understand my Granny more than I ever have, my relationship with her, how she views other people and why it’s difficult for her and other people to get along. When I read each of these books, I leave them with a better understanding of the way words can be used, of the way beauty can be found in the mundane. It feels like such a gift.

Over the last seven months, I’ve worked hard to share my journey in becoming a better reader—one who understands the technical aspects of books, who considers different lenses and how storytelling evolves, who thinks about the historical context and the ways different books are in conversation. But the way I got into writing about books was through the ways I connected with them on a personal level. I don’t always know if this is interesting to anyone or if it helps, but I do think that the ways we connect with books and the ways they tether themselves to our lives is a beautiful thing. And I wanted to take the chance to document a bit of that today.

If you’ve read these books, if you have any thoughts on them or just thoughts on all of this in general, let me know. As always, I’m forever grateful for any of you who take the time to read these.

Until next time,

XOXO