Home: A Novel
by Marilynne Robinson
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Book Reviews of Home: A Novel
Book Review: Quietly brilliant.
Summary: 4 Stars
In the case of a writer less gifted and more commercially driven than Marilynne Robinson, it would be tempting to conclude that HOME, set in the mid-1950s in the same small Iowa town as her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel GILEAD, represented a mercenary attempt to capitalize on the well-deserved honors accorded that book. Instead, she has accomplished the feat of reintroducing the characters of GILEAD from a fresh perspective, with a grace and wisdom that will deepen the understanding of readers of that novel and send those who first encounter her creations in this book back to its predecessor.
Unlike GILEAD, narrated by the aging Congregationalist minister John Ames in a series of letters to his seven-year-old son, HOME is written in the third-person, the story told through the sensitive, observant eyes of Glory, the youngest of eight siblings in the family of Robert Boughton, the Presbyterian minister of Gilead and a close friend, if occasional religious antagonist, to Ames.
Fresh from the failure of a lengthy relationship that damaged her both emotionally and financially, Glory, in her late 30s, has returned to the longtime family home, "this place of solemn and perpetual evening," to attend to her dying father. Into their lives returns her brother Jack, estranged from the family for some 20 years, after fleeing Gilead on the heels of fathering an illegitimate child who later dies. Jack (the godson and namesake of Reverend Ames) is the family renegade, "so conspicuously not good as to cast a shadow over their household," a recovering alcoholic who has drifted through a life of petty crime and dead end jobs. But in an essential way, Glory seems able to identify with Jack's struggles because of the way her life, too, has run aground in midstream. "Neither one of us would be here if we weren't in some kind of --- difficulty," she concedes.
The three Boughtons tentatively engage each other again in the family homestead, as Robinson expertly sketches what she calls "the intimacy of the ordinary." Jack tends to household chores, reclaiming a garden patch and restoring an ailing DeSoto. Glory anxiously eyes her brother, her thoughts balanced between the fragile hope that he's capable of making a new start and her fear of the consequences of a relapse into his old ways. Reverend Boughton's pleasure at this son's return slowly seeps away as he and Jack realize they must struggle toward a reconciliation unlikely to occur.
The narrative is tightly focused, almost microscopic in its attention to detail, and there's little in the way of dramatic action to move the plot forward. But Robinson builds tension by slowly peeling away layers to reveal enduring truths about the themes that animate both Gilead novels: the often fraught relationships between fathers and sons, the stain of racial intolerance on American life, and the rewards of religious faith and its sometime stern demands. While grounded in 1950s Middle America, the narrative exudes a feeling of timelessness, echoing biblical stories (Abraham and Ishmael, David and Absalom) sometimes explicitly discussed and other times only recognizable in the shadows.
Marilynne Robinson's work is rewarding as much for the elegant simplicity of her prose as it is for the depth and power of her themes. It's easy to linger over each sentence, chiseled as it is from hard stone. Describing the first time Jack takes the family car, on which he's lavished hours of attention, out for a drive, she writes, "Jack put his arm out the window, waving his hat like a visiting dignitary, backed into the street and gloated away, gentling the gleaming dirigible through the shadows of arching elm trees, light dropping on it through their leaves like confetti as it made its ceremonious passage." That same beauty of language is manifest in the intense level of observation Glory trains on Jack. Whether she's describing "that estrangement of his gaze, that look of urgent calculation, of sharply attentive calm" or the way he appears to her "haggard and probationary, with little of his youth left to him except the wry elusiveness, secretiveness that he did in fact seem to wear on his skin," there's a surpassing tenderness in the depiction of one sibling's love for another.
Explaining her decision, in a recent interview, to return to Gilead, Robinson said, "Those characters were just in my mind --- it was as if I could sense that there was another whole reality I could explore." There is, as she has demonstrated in this quietly brilliant work.
--- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg ([..]
Book Review: Heart-wrenching, haunting, beautiful...
Summary: 5 Stars
This story is set in the 1950's in a small rural town in Iowa (Gilead). Robert Boughton, a retired and aging minister, is in poor health. Glory Boughton, 38, his youngest daughter, has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father and to regroup after the failure of a longstanding relationship and the evaporation of her dreams of home, marriage and children.
"I am 38 years old, she would say to herself as she tidied up after supper. I have a master's degree. I taught high school English for 13 years. I was a good teacher. What have I done with my life? What has become of it? It is as if I had a dream of adult life and woke up from it, still here in my parents' house."
Jack Broughton, his father's most beloved son, also returns home after a twenty-year disappearance - looking for peace, forgiveness, a refuge and reconciliation - with his Father, his family and a community which he ran from after earning a reputation as a thief and a scoundrel.
"Jack was exceptional in every way he could be, including of course, truancy and misfeasance."
Glory and Jack unravel their personal histories slowly - one slight pull at a time on a large ball of string. The simplicity of the story is tied with tension, heartwarming and difficult memories, conflicted emotions and most of all - with love - among family members and Father to son. Glory and Jack slowly build a relationship while caring for their Father.
The story is anchored around Jack and his relationship with his Father - a kind, graceful, forgiving man - who is elated to have his son home to settle his longstanding worries and concerns - yet other concerns have now surfaced - including how to deal with Jack's restlessness, his troubling "behaviors" - and finally his concern over Jack leaving again and being out of reach of help.
"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 - it's like watching a child die in your arms. (He looked at Jack.) Which I have done."
My assessment:
1) One of the best books I have read. A sad but hauntingly beautiful book (or perhaps better described as a work of art) by a writer who is in a professional class of her own. I couldn't put it down.
2) Beautiful, crystal clear images and plain spoken prose.
"And there was an oak tree in front of the house, much older than the neighborhood or the town, which made rubble of the pavement at its foot and flung its imponderable branches out over the road and across the yard, branches whose girth were greater than the trunk of any ordinary tree. There was a torsion in its body that made it look like a giant dervish to them. Their father said if they could see as God can, in geological time, they would see it leap out of the ground and turn in the sun and spread its arms and bask in the joys of being an oak tree in Iowa."
3) Not for everyone. Slow Pace. Thin Plot. Deep Character insights.
If you are looking for in-your-face suspense thriller, murder mysteries, car crashes, this book won't be for you. This is quiet, gentle, artful prose that carries your interest like a gentle breeze on a warm summer day. You can feel your heart beat slow as you turn the pages - yet she pulls you along a slow moving river, wanting to see what's around the next bend - and often times it is a peek into what the characters think and feel.
4) Feels like the application of a soothing balm over a sore that won't heal.
Novel highlights the imperfections of man. The beauty, strength and pain of unconditional love. The binds of family and friends. How belief and doubt affect our daily lives. How leading the simplest life can be touched by grace, wonder and heart ache.
This is a genius work by a master craftsperson. I was sorry for the story to come to an end.
Book Review: The hardest forgiveness is to forgive oneself
Summary: 5 Stars
The characters are so well drawn:
The Reverend Boughton: a frail, patriarchal, prayerful old widower; devout, meaning to live and love like a Christian (though he shows no Christian concern for the black civil rights movement). Forgiving, of course, is not forgetting.
His daughter Glory: his 38 year old daughter and the youngest of his eight children, who, several months before the book opens, has come home - the old home which has never changed - to Gilead (Iowa) to look after him in his last days. Her life has been unfulfilled, and, though she loves him and does her best to see he is not upset, it is not fulfilled by her coming to look after him now.
His son Jack, a fascinating character: the black sheep ; had felt an outsider in the family ever since childhood; his delinquency impulsive rather than wicked; ever polite; as a child always ready to apologize for his misdeeds but always indulging in new ones; had fathered an illegitimate child; had then disappeared for twenty years, to the grief of his father who never failed to love him or to worry about his soul. Now the Prodigal Son suddenly returns, and the old father, always ready to forgive, shows more joy for the stray sheep that has returned than for the Martha-like devotion of his daughter. (The book abounds in biblical echoes.) He asks no questions of what Jack has been up to these twenty years (but imagines the worst), and Glory dares not ask either. And has he come back, battered by the storms of his life, to seek a refuge? Or out of nostalgia for the childhood home? Or trying to make reparation? Or out of concern for his old father? Or seeking forgiveness?
From childhood onwards Glory has always looked for Jack's approval. He had casually patted her on the head, no more. Now he is polite to her, but she feels no warmth; initially she resents the way he has `taken over the house', feels taken for granted by her father, her life more unfulfilled than ever. But then the relationship between her and Jack becomes deeper, more intimate, if edgy at first: both try elaborately not to touch on raw places, but both unintentionally (or with subconscious intention?) fail in this: even a smile or a pause are taken by the other as unspoken comments. But then slowly, slowly, the intimacy between brother and sister deepens, becomes warmer. Jack comes to trust her - not wholly, but more than he trusts anyone else; and she feels rewarded by that. They dare gradually to reveal to each other something of what they have suffered, of what they have done and of what they have had done to them. But there are still things neither of them will talk about, and the reader will only ever have intimations, but no precise details, about them.
Both Glory and her father are terrified - Glory at first as much on her father's behalf as on her own - that if they upset Jack, he will disappear again; and if he is out the house for a few hours, they begin to worry.
Jack, always doubting his welcome despite the reassurances from his father and his sister, knows that all their worries mean that they have never forgotten earlier escapades; and the people of Gilead don't seem to have forgotten either - especially not the Reverend Ames, the other old clergyman in the village, a friend of the Reverend Boughton and a sterner version of him.
As it is, Jack feels the shame of what he has done in the past, which all the forgiveness of his father and the assurances of his sister cannot remove - a shame which makes it so hard for him to stay in Gilead. In any case, the father's forgiveness is not as straightforward as it appears: it takes several forms: blaming himself for having in some way failed his son; clearly troubled in his soul about the sins that Jack might have committed during his long absence; praying for his salvation; in the end losing the strength to conceal his hurt - these are not so much balm as pain for Jack.
The whole book crackles with tension. Always one fears that something terrible will happen. It is full of grief and suffering, but also suffused with love and with loving concern; and it is profound, subtle, and infinitely moving.
Book Review: The Prodigal at Home
Summary: 5 Stars
How simple it seems, that story of the Prodigal Son! The wanderer returns; his joyful father falls on his shoulder and orders the fatted calf to be killed; the stay-at-home sibling is resentful for a while, but presumably learns to deal with it. For the story stops there. There is no tomorrow. The Bible doesn't ask what happens in the weeks and months after that. Is the family happily reunited? Does the Prodigal never yearn to be off again? Where does life go from here? These are some of the many questions posed by Marilynne Robinson in her latest novel, HOME, a sister work to her Pulitzer Prize-winning GILEAD.
HOME is not a sequel to GILEAD, but a parallel novel, taking place in the same town (Gilead, Iowa), at exactly the same time (1956), and involving many of the same characters. Readers of the earlier novel will recall that the town has two elderly preachers, John Ames and Robert Boughton, close friends since childhood. In HOME, the action shifts from Ames' house to that of Boughton, a wonderful old man magnificently characterized through his way of talking, warmly benevolent with unexpected edges of granite. At the start of the book, his youngest daughter Glory, now 38, returns home to care for her father; she appears to be in retreat from problems of her own, but their nature only gradually becomes clear. A little later, Jack Boughton, the black sheep of the family, arrives after an absence of twenty years. Jack appears in GILEAD also; some of the information from the earlier book is revealed immediately, but we learn much more about his tormented life as the book goes on. One essential revelation from GILEAD is postponed to the very last pages of HOME, so that readers who come to this book first may find the ending even more moving. For Jack, with his mixture of outward charm and inner despair, becomes a character to care for. We follow his spiritual trajectory over the next few months first with hope, then with joy, then with sympathy. This is a sad book, but by no means a bleak one.
Are there really two novels to be found in Gilead in 1956? Not quite; more like one and three-quarters. But this second book, though perhaps overlong, is entirely absorbing in its own right, and surprisingly different from its predecessor. GILEAD was a vertical book, having to do with four generations of fathers and sons, and with man's relationship to God; HOME is a horizontal one, focusing on the relationship between brother and sister, and the accumulation of memories, custom, and duties that make a home a home, whether a solace or a burden. GILEAD was broad in scope, reaching back to the Civil War and denying the apparent isolation of its characters in place and time; HOME turns inward, presenting the outside world merely as something lurking on the periphery. I was going to say that while GILEAD is primarily a religious work, HOME is a secular one, but that is not quite true; HOME does not quite have the luminous spirituality of GILEAD, yet GILEAD also seems the more down-to-earth of the two books. This reduction in range made me question giving HOME its fifth star -- and yet why not, since it pales only by comparison with GILEAD, which was a six-, seven-, or ten-star book if there ever was one?
Marilynne Robinson continues to write shining prose that compels you to keep reading, common sense expressed with scriptural overtones, as in this passage where John Ames contemplates how his friend Reverend Boughton must feel in his retirement: "The Sunday-school children were marrying, and the married couples had settled into difficult, ordinary life, and the grave old men and women who had taught the Sunday-school children about bands of angels and flying chariots were themselves crossing over Jordan one by one." If this seems as beautiful to you as it does to me, you will enjoy this moving and deeply understanding novel.
Book Review: retreat and hide from former lives
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a beautiful sensitive book about family relations. The main characters are Robert Boughton, a retired Presbyterian minister, his school teacher daughter, Glory, who has left teaching to care for her elderly father and his son Jack, who after disappearing for twenty years, comes home, thus the name of the book. Both son and daughter have been disappointed in life. Glory expected to be married and have children but this is not to be. Her dream of love, marriage and family is gone. Jack, the family black sheep, also has broken dreams.
The brother and sister begin reminising about their childhood, the games they played, the things they did, the mischief they got into, especially the boys and the former neighbors. Glory is Jack's kid sister, the youngest of eight. Jack is his own person, does his own thing whether it is agreeable to others or not. All the other children have moved away and established their own lives and family. These two have returned. They have noone in their lives. The wife and mother has died ten years ago.
So there is just the three residing in this big empty house in this quiet little Iowa town in the home they have been brought up. Father is also a native of Gilead, Iowa and has left his hometown only on very seldom occasions.
There is much about domestic chores, cooking, cleaning, gardening and all else that goes into the work and upkeep of a home. The time is the mid nineteen fifties. So much has changed from then until now. Times seem to be so much quieter and less sophisticated in those days. Nothing is rushed, people are not glued to television or computer. Radio is listened to back in those times and in that part of the country. People did not eat so much fast food, Glory cooked family meals every day and the small family sat down together to eat. Still, the three felt uneasy and unfamiliar with one another on too many times.
These family members are not used to being demonstrative with each other, to be close to each other, to really know each other but they are trying to get to know one another, to reveal themselves to each other, to express their love and caring for each other, but it so hard for these people who are used to hiding their feelings and their lives. Glory has always been the good girl, the good teacher giving up her career to care for her dying father. Glory thinks of her broken dreams, of her desire to have her own family, of having a loving husband and children. Jack loves a woman who will not return his letters and whose father disapproves of him. The lady lives far away and seems to want nothing to do with this man. She is a mystery to Glory and their father. Jack has no photographs of her. Jack tells his sister he has always felt he never belonged to the family, to their home, to the town. He has always been alone.
This is a deep book concerning much with deep emotions and thoughts of one family. Drifting in and out of the book are John Ames, his much younger wife and their little boy Robbie, major characters from Gilead, minor characters in Home. Also Dr. Ted, Jack and Glory's brother enters into the story.
There are deep discussion of religious concepts. The book cover is beautiful, old timey and fits well with the book content.