Home: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson
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Book Reviews of Home: A Novel
Book Review: Gilead revisited : Home is where one starts from
Summary: 4 Stars
All the sons and daughters of the Rev. Boughton dutifully return home to Gilead for Thanksgiving and Christmas, submit to the family traditions, and then quickly leave again to pursue their own lives. All but one: Jack, the prodigal son, has not been heard from in twenty years. When he suddenly turns up in Gilead, he is surrounded by mystery: Where has he been all these years? What has he been doing? Why is he coming back now?
His ailing, widowed father, whose patience and forbearance seem almost saintly, does not question him. His sister Glory, who has come home after a failed relationship, regards him warily. To these two damaged siblings, home is a refuge, but not a comfort.
Gifted. charming, reclusive Jack meets his father's attempts at reconciliation with polite evasiveness. It falls to Glory to gradually draw him out, to slowly win his trust. Her own predicament - she has been deceived and abandoned by the man she loved - serves as a distorted reflection of Jack's misdeeds, and he begins to confide in her.
He makes a brave attempt at overcoming his skepticism, but his father's certainties, the "Presbyterian probity and rectitude", get in the way. Buried resentments and old grief come bubbling to the surface. Jack chafes at his father's futile attempts to start a "conversation" with him. Called upon to say Grace before a meal or to play a hymn on the piano, he feels that he is on trial, that his performance is being scrutinized and graded. There are probing questions concerning Presbyterian theology: predestination, "election", forgiveness, damnation; God's judgment and God's grace. With his old friend, the Rev. Ames, Boughton engages in heated arguments about theological dogma and politics. Jack wonders how dogma can be reconciled with Scripture, and how the accident of birth affects destiny - but the answers he receives do not satisfy him. Lila Ames' simple belief in salvation carries more conviction than the high-flown arguments of the learned men.
This domestic struggle proceeds against the background of 1950s political and social upheaval: the Civil Rights movement, the brinkmanship of John Foster Dulles ("that nice Presbyterian gentleman"), the beginning of the Cold War, the threat of the atom bomb; and, of course, the theology of Karl Barth.
The parochialism of the town is evident: other denominations are eyed with suspicion. The Rev. Boughton has been "abroad" only once: to Minnesota, where to his consternation he found a lot of Lutherans. Anglicans are viewed with outright animosity.
There are no "colored" people in Gilead. Boughton dismisses the first stirrings of the Civil Rights struggle as a temporary problem.
The full extent of Jack's predicament is not revealed until the very end of the novel, and the outcome is uncertain.
Some situations in this story seem to me somewhat contrived - quite obviously set up to make a specific point. I did not have that problem with "GILEAD". Still, despite occasional rumblings of discontent, I found "HOME" an extraordinarily rich and rewarding novel.
Book Review: aging children, aged father
Summary: 4 Stars
In her Pulitzer Prize winner Gilead, named the #1 fiction book of 2004 by the New York Times, Marilynne Robinson told the story of Pastor John Ames, a fourth generation Congregationalist pastor in Gilead, Iowa. More exactly, she allowed Pastor Ames to tell his own story, for the book is a 240-page letter from the 76-year-old Ames to his seven-year-old son. In the letter Pastor Ames looks inwardly to untangle how his present reality in his old and feeble years relates to whatever constitutes Ultimate Reality. Parts of his letter also fret about "the beloved child of my oldest and dearest friend." That would be "Jack" (John) Boughton, son of Gilead's Presbyterian pastor, Robert Boughton, who is named after Ames himself.
In a parallel but independent story, Home takes us back to Gilead in the 1950s. Glory, age 38 and the youngest of eight Boughton children, has left her teaching job in Des Moines and returned to Gilead to care for her aged and feeble father, Robert. She's deeply lonely and never married, although we learn she does have a romantic past. As a good pastor's kid, she still reads her Bible, and since Robert is a widower, Glory takes charge of all things domestic. Without explanation, the black sheep of the family, Jack, returns home after a twenty year absence. Jack is 43, an alcoholic, a thief who has spent time in prison, a miscreant who fathered a child out of wedlock, and, worst of all for his loving father, a decided non-believer. But Jack knows the Scriptures better than most, he plays hymns for his father, and he has a broken heart for an unlikely woman who did him nothing but good. He's come home seeking reconciliation. But that is easier said than done.
The Bible's parable of the prodigal son is far neater than this family's story. "It's a powerful thing, family," says Robert (176). Indeed, it is, especially when your family is a pastor's family brimming with Presbyterian probity and earnestness, a family that is good in order to look good. "Such a wonderful family they were!" (7). But there are no villains in this story. Father Robert is tired, sad, and tirelessly tender; he falls asleep at dinner, succumbs to dementia, and is vexed at how and why Jack arrived at his sorry state. Glory is the peace keeper who moves between accepting people, trying to fix them, and enabling them. Jack is irony personified. These are lovable characters. They have secrets that define them, roles that have been assigned to them for decades, memories both pleasant and painful, all come together in a house full of family ghosts. "This life on earth is a strange business," says Glory (253). And so she prays at dinner what we all hope and pray, "Dear God in heaven, please help us. Dear God, please help everyone we love. Amen." (292).
Book Review: The Prodigal Son Comes Home
Summary: 4 Stars
Home, by Marilynne Robinson is set in the same fictional Iowa town Gilead as (Robinson's last novel) . I really enjoyed the audio version of Gilead when I listened to it, and I also enjoyed her earlier book: Housekeeping.
In Home, Jack Boughton, the prodigal son, is one of the eight children of Robert Boughton, the former Gilead, Iowa, pastor, who now, in 1957, is a widowed and dying man. Jack returns home after a 20 year absence, shortly after his sister Glory, 38, the youngest of the children, moves in to nurse their father. It is through Glory's eyes that we see Jack's drama unfold. When Glory last saw Jack, she was 16, and he was leaving Gilead with a bad reputation, having gotten an underage girl pregnant. By his account, he'd since lived as a vagrant, drunk and jailbird until he met a woman named Della in St. Louis. Little by little throughout the book we see Jack and Glory bond while taking care of their father, but when Jack's letters to Della are returned unopened, Glory has to deal with Jack's relapse into bad habits and the effect it has on their father.
Although it is not necessary to read Gilead before reading Home, I would recommend it. Out of the (3) books by the author, Home was my least favorite. I found parts of it painfully slow, as I read page after page, in detail, of the family's daily activities: cooking, sitting on a porch, gardening etc. The one redeeming fact was that the author's writing was beautiful, so it made even the mundane a bit more interesting. One other point--- I would consider this book Christian Fiction. If this does not bother you then give this book a try.
Book Review: Beautiful, like another taste of Gilead
Summary: 4 Stars
I relished the reading of this book. The language and the story are unhurried, lyrical, and deep. The handcrafting of the prose is wonderful. This novel is set in a slow 1950's summer in Gilead, the small Iowa town that is the setting for the Robinson's Pulitzer Prize winning novel that takes it's name from the town. The time frame of Home is concurrent with Gilead and the characters are the same. Gilead focuses on the family of the aged Congregational Reverend Ames. Home focuses on the family of Ames lifelong best friend, Presbyterian Reverend Boughton.
I appreciated this novel for many of the same reasons that I appreciated Gilead. The pace is unhurried and the quiet summer allows the characters to reflect deeply on their own lives. While the pace and action is gentle, this novel goes deeply and unflinchingly into topics on periphery of many of our own lives. Religious faith and skepticism in the same close family. Mid life crises that come to grips with the fallout from regrettable long past decisions and impending deaths of parents. Home deals with these tough topics that we all face in our own lives but it somehow leaves me using the word `Beautiful' to describe this novel. I'm sorry that I'm done reading it because I wanted it to go on, maybe because a slow summer in Gilead is so unlike my own rushed life of hi tech engineering and three small children. I could use a summer in Gilead in my own life.
Book Review: The Saddest Music in the World
Summary: 4 Stars
I have not read Marilynne Robinson's books, but after reading Home I intend to.
Home is a languid, terribly sad, story about the relationship between a dutiful daughter, a prodigal son and a dying father. Glory, the daughter, hurt in love, has come home to care for her aging father in the town of Gilead. Into their life comes Jack, the son who has been missing for twenty years: the criminal son, the alcoholic son, and the son the father worried about for all those years. For one summer they try to understand each other, understand the nature of failure, and understand the bond of family. Robinson has a wonderful knack for extracting the full communicative potential of small every-day actions allowing the reader to see the myriad of ways that family members speak and fail to speak to each other.
The book is set in the Midwest. The father was a Midwestern protestant minister, and the family speaks to each other in the cadences of Midwestern reserve. It is a subtle language to the uninitiated, but as rich as any other and Robinson does it as well as I have seen it done.
Glory was often brought to tears by some event or comment. She cries easily and would say about her tears, "It doesn't matter." I am a tough old man most of the time but often as I read, when a tear came to Glory's eyes a tear came to mine as well.