Home: A Novel
by Marilynne Robinson
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Book Summary Information
Author: Marilynne RobinsonEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-09-02
ISBN: 0374299102
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Book Reviews of Home: A Novel
Book Review: Good Man, Troubled Man
Summary: 5 Stars
As most readers of this review will know, Home is Marilynne Robinson's second novel set in Gilead, Iowa, in 1956. The first novel, Gilead, tells the story of John Ames, an elderly minister dying of a heart condition who decides to write an account of his life and kin for his seven-year-old son, Robby. The entire book is his letter to Robby, written over the course of a summer. As Rev. Ames writes, his namesake, John Ames Boughton (Jack), returns to Gilead after leaving many years earlier amidst scandal. Jack is the son of Robert Boughton, Rev. Ames's lifelong friend and fellow Gilead minister.
While Gilead focuses on the Ames household, Home tells the story of the Boughton household. Rev. Boughton is a widower whose health is also declining. Glory, the youngest of his eight children, has just moved back home in the aftermath of a failed relationship. And Jack, his wayward son whom he has not seen in some 20 years, has come home troubled and looking for peace. The two novels unfold not in series but in parallel and offer many wonderful points of intersection. I loved both books.
Gilead is the story of a good man whose interior life shines through his long letter to his son. Rev. Ames is utterly real in his sorrows and failings, but also in his quiet strength, steadfastness, and confidence in the Lord. As a young man he lost his first wife and daughter during childbirth, then endured many lonely years as a widowed minister. His main comforts were his books, his friendship with Robert Boughton, the seeming immutability of Gilead itself, and most of all his sense of God's presence permeating all of life. Late in his life, Lila came to his church. Although half his age, she was already wearied and wisened by life; it is implied that she had a sad and broken past. Through Rev. Ames, she came to faith and was baptized. They eventually married, but because of his propriety as a minister and his respect for the difference in their ages it was she who proposed to him: "You ought to marry me."
Rev. Ames's long letter to Robby is in turns personal story, sensitive meditation, affectionate letter, and deep expression of concern for his family. He tells the stories of his grandfather and father, both ministers, but one a violent abolitionist and the other a pacifist. His feelings are palpable when he describes how fiercely he loves his life; when he wishes Robby knew him in his strength; when he tells Robby how much he means to him; when he describes the lonely years as a period for which he is grateful, but also a period which seems like "a long, bitter prayer that was answered finally;" when he wishes he had set more aside for Lila and Robby to live on after he is gone; and when he expresses both apprehensiveness that Jack may harm them and pastoral concern for Jack's troubled soul.
If Gilead is about a good man, Home is about a troubled man. The one man's goodness and the other man's troubled life seem in no way related to their given circumstances. Jack appears to have had every advantage. He was gifted with intelligence, good health, a large loving family, and a good upbringing. And yet he kept apart, incomprehensible, seemingly disdainful of those who loved him. He was a thief and vandal. He was profoundly cruel and unfeeling. Then he disappeared.
When Jack returns home he is humble but guarded. Bit by bit, he reconnects with his sister and tries to reconnect with his father. As it turns out, Glory is suffering through her own quiet misery. But she loves Jack, just as she always has, and reaches out to him. They pass the summer days caring for their father and making him as comfortable as possible, and attending to the humdrum things of life: cooking, eating meals together, cultivating the garden, doing the laundry, and chipping away at the dishevelment and disrepair that have overtaken the house and the old DeSoto. Bits and pieces of Jack's past surface: the prison time, the alcoholism, the woman he still cares for in St. Louis... In ways indirect and finally direct, he asks for Glory's help escaping from himself.
Home is a long, lovely, melancholic river. The characters are so human, the dialogue so real, you can feel the grace, yearning, and brokenness of their lives. The story asks but does not answer why some people ascend, but others descend. Why some find community, but others struggle to do so. Why some easily find purpose, but others are restless and adrift their whole lives. Why some are good, but others are irresistibly drawn to destructive behavior. Why all are broken, but only some rise out of their brokenness.
My favorite scene (described in both Gilead and Home) is a conversation that takes place on the Boughtons' front porch. Rev. Ames and Lila have dropped by to visit Rev. Boughton. Glory and Jack join them on the front porch. By this time in his life, Jack has given much earnest thought to his father's faith, a faith that he has never been able to make his own. He is troubled by the idea of predestination--that some people may be "intentionally and irretrievably consigned to perdition." And troubled personally that he himself might be "an instance of predestination, a sort of proof." So he asks Rev. Ames for his views on predestination. There follows a long and rather fruitless theological discussion between Jack, Rev. Ames, and Rev. Boughton. In the end, Jack apologizes for having gone on too long. He is about to leave and go help Glory in the kitchen. But Lila, who has been mostly silent up to this point, asks him to stay for a minute. Then, mustering herself, she says simply, "A person can change. Everything can change." There is a pause. Rev. Ames is moved by this glimpse into his wife's soul. And Jack responds gently, "Why thank you, Mrs. Ames. That's all I wanted to know."
Summary of Home: A Novel
Hundreds of thousands were enthralled by the luminous voice of John Ames in Gilead, Marilynne Robinson?s Pulitzer Prize?winning novel. Home is an entirely independent, deeply affecting novel that takes place concurrently in the same locale, this time in the household of Reverend Robert Boughton, Ames?s closest friend.
Glory Boughton, aged thirty-eight, has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father. Soon her brother, Jack?the prodigal son of the family, gone for twenty years?comes home too, looking for refuge and trying to make peace with a past littered with tormenting trouble and pain.
Jack is one of the great characters in recent literature. A bad boy from childhood, an alcoholic who cannot hold a job, he is perpetually at odds with his surroundings and with his traditionalist father, though he remains Boughton?s most beloved child. Brilliant, lovable, and wayward, Jack forges an intense bond with Glory and engages painfully with Ames, his godfather and namesake.
Home is a moving and healing book about families, family secrets, and the passing of the generations, about love and death and faith. It is Robinson?s greatest work, an unforgettable embodiment of the deepest and most universal emotions.
Home is a 2008 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction.
Amazon Best of the Month, September 2008: "What does it mean to come home?" In one way or another, every character in Home is searching for that answer. Glory Boughton, now 38 and lovelorn, has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father. Her wayward brother Jack also finds his way back, though his is an uneasy homecoming, reverberating with the scandal that drove him away twenty years earlier. Glory and Jack unravel their stories slowly, speaking to each other more in movements than in words--a careful glance here, a chair pulled out from the table there--against a domestic backdrop so richly imagined you may be fooled into believing their house is your own. Meanwhile, their father, whose ebullient love for his children is a welcome counterpoint to Glory and Jack's conflicted emotions, experiences his own kind of reckoning as he yearns to understand his troubled son. There is a simplicity to this story that belies the complexity of its characters--they are bound together by a profound capacity for love and by an equally powerful sense of private conviction that tries the ties that bind, but never breaks them. It's a delicate sort of tension that you think would resist exposition--and in fact these characters seem to want nothing more than, as Glory says, to treat "one another's deceptions like truth"--but Marilynne Robinson's fine, tender prose imbues this family's secrets with an overwhelming grace. --Anne Bartholomew
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