I remarked a few weeks ago that we had read and enjoyed Marilynne Robinson's Gilead (cf. link). I held off commenting in detail, anticipating the completion of its companion volume, Home. We're done with Home now and I only hope I can justice. That is: I don't read enough current fiction to speak with authority on the topic, but if there is anything much better out there than this extraordinary pair, I would be very, very surprised. As an account of family life, it's the best thing I've read since Amos Tale of Love and Darkness. As a model of engagement and inquiry, I'd bracket it with the likes of Flannery O'Connor and Cynthia Ozick.
In structure and provenance, this pair defies comparison. Provenance: Robinson is an Idaho girl, who wrote one incomparable novel--Housekeeping--set in Idaho,but that was 29 years ago (link). After that, mostly silence (punctuated by some essays). Then Gilead in 2004 and at last Home in 2008.
But it is more compicated than that. After her long silence, the Idaho girl recreates herself in Iowa, of all places--the sere, daunting landscape of the farm belt, the heartland (so it would seem) of a kind of Calvinist theology. And apparently this is no idle experiment: rather, she wrote Gilead and Home simultaneously, and they are all of a piece, just as integrated as the multiple stories in Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet.
And structure: I can't think of any other story told quite this way. Gilead is a book-length meditation by an old pastor on his life and the world in which he lives it. Home is said to be the same story, told from the standpoint of another pastor, his lifelong friend. But it's not, exactly. It is, rather, the story of that other pastor and the life he leads interwoven with the lives of his two of his children, duck eggs in a nest of swans. These various lives overlap, they refract on and inform each other, but each is its own life, and one of Robinson's many achievements is that she drives home this variousness: there isn't a single "center" to this pairing (except possibly God). Rather, we see an array of lives, each a puzzle to itself in its own way, each (well: most of them) a puzzle to be solved, or not solved as the case may be.
We read Gilead first and then Home. I'm not at all sure this is the best order. Gilead is, as perhaps I have suggested, not quite a novel, so much as an extended discursive essay, built around a character who seems to belong in the category of the "truly good," along with Pickwick or Prince Myshkin or, I suppose Don Quixote. As an essay, it is arresting and provocative as you could want. There's story there also but the story doesn't quite jell, and we are often left aching to know more about what is happening offstage.
In this light, Home is a startling departure. It's much more a piece of fiction: indeed far and away the best parts of it are those recurrent encounters between Jack and his sister Glory, brother and sister, baffled seekers after the thread of their own lives as they try to find places for themselves in a family (and a world) which seems never quite suited to them. It's wonderful stuff in its own right, but it is vastly improved by the texture and resonance of the extended essay which can be understood as the background against which these mysteries are setoff. Time and again, I found myself recognizing something unspoken from Gilead as essential to the story of Home. In this respect, I'm glad I read Gilead first. Yet I'll never know the shock that would come had I read Home first, and then read Gilead as as a (partial) key to the great puzzle.
I mentioned Flannery O'Connor and Cynthia Ozick (I could have added Bernard Malamud and J. F. Powers, although they are a bit further removed). The common theme is that they are all "religious" writers (if that term is capable of carrying any serviceable meaning). Like Ozick, Robinson has ventured beyond fiction to try to expand her own understanding: her essays in The Death of Adam--particularly her extended defense of Puritanism--add further dimension to the world of the novels. Just this morning in the Sunday Times, I read that O'Connor "read a lot of theology because she believed it made her writing bolder." An interesting choice of words; likely true for O'Connor but I suspect it might apply equally well to any of the three.
I wouldn't go so far as to say these Robinson novels are perfect: I guess I've already said that the hero of Gilead is a bit too perfect, and that his story is not quite a novel. With Jack and Gloria in Home--by the end, you want to pick them up and just shake fhem and say: that is just the way the world is, pull up your socks and get moving. In each case, I'd say we have a structural problem that the author hasn't quite solved. But there is so much to take hold of here, so much to hold onto, that for the moment I can't think of any way I am likely to enjoy reading more than simply to read them again.
Afterthought: Dare one to hope that these two are not the end? Is there any chance that she has others in the safe deposit fact that explore other characters and refract upon this same situation in a different way?
In structure and provenance, this pair defies comparison. Provenance: Robinson is an Idaho girl, who wrote one incomparable novel--Housekeeping--set in Idaho,but that was 29 years ago (link). After that, mostly silence (punctuated by some essays). Then Gilead in 2004 and at last Home in 2008.
But it is more compicated than that. After her long silence, the Idaho girl recreates herself in Iowa, of all places--the sere, daunting landscape of the farm belt, the heartland (so it would seem) of a kind of Calvinist theology. And apparently this is no idle experiment: rather, she wrote Gilead and Home simultaneously, and they are all of a piece, just as integrated as the multiple stories in Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet.
And structure: I can't think of any other story told quite this way. Gilead is a book-length meditation by an old pastor on his life and the world in which he lives it. Home is said to be the same story, told from the standpoint of another pastor, his lifelong friend. But it's not, exactly. It is, rather, the story of that other pastor and the life he leads interwoven with the lives of his two of his children, duck eggs in a nest of swans. These various lives overlap, they refract on and inform each other, but each is its own life, and one of Robinson's many achievements is that she drives home this variousness: there isn't a single "center" to this pairing (except possibly God). Rather, we see an array of lives, each a puzzle to itself in its own way, each (well: most of them) a puzzle to be solved, or not solved as the case may be.
We read Gilead first and then Home. I'm not at all sure this is the best order. Gilead is, as perhaps I have suggested, not quite a novel, so much as an extended discursive essay, built around a character who seems to belong in the category of the "truly good," along with Pickwick or Prince Myshkin or, I suppose Don Quixote. As an essay, it is arresting and provocative as you could want. There's story there also but the story doesn't quite jell, and we are often left aching to know more about what is happening offstage.
In this light, Home is a startling departure. It's much more a piece of fiction: indeed far and away the best parts of it are those recurrent encounters between Jack and his sister Glory, brother and sister, baffled seekers after the thread of their own lives as they try to find places for themselves in a family (and a world) which seems never quite suited to them. It's wonderful stuff in its own right, but it is vastly improved by the texture and resonance of the extended essay which can be understood as the background against which these mysteries are setoff. Time and again, I found myself recognizing something unspoken from Gilead as essential to the story of Home. In this respect, I'm glad I read Gilead first. Yet I'll never know the shock that would come had I read Home first, and then read Gilead as as a (partial) key to the great puzzle.
I mentioned Flannery O'Connor and Cynthia Ozick (I could have added Bernard Malamud and J. F. Powers, although they are a bit further removed). The common theme is that they are all "religious" writers (if that term is capable of carrying any serviceable meaning). Like Ozick, Robinson has ventured beyond fiction to try to expand her own understanding: her essays in The Death of Adam--particularly her extended defense of Puritanism--add further dimension to the world of the novels. Just this morning in the Sunday Times, I read that O'Connor "read a lot of theology because she believed it made her writing bolder." An interesting choice of words; likely true for O'Connor but I suspect it might apply equally well to any of the three.
I wouldn't go so far as to say these Robinson novels are perfect: I guess I've already said that the hero of Gilead is a bit too perfect, and that his story is not quite a novel. With Jack and Gloria in Home--by the end, you want to pick them up and just shake fhem and say: that is just the way the world is, pull up your socks and get moving. In each case, I'd say we have a structural problem that the author hasn't quite solved. But there is so much to take hold of here, so much to hold onto, that for the moment I can't think of any way I am likely to enjoy reading more than simply to read them again.
Afterthought: Dare one to hope that these two are not the end? Is there any chance that she has others in the safe deposit fact that explore other characters and refract upon this same situation in a different way?
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