Home: A Novel
by Marilynne Robinson
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Book Reviews of Home: A Novel
Book Review: Is Where The Heart Is
Summary: 5 Stars
All of us at some point find a book that we find so eloquently written that we wish it would not end. 'Home' is that book for me. The characters are so rich and full and so like people I know.
The Prodigal Son, Jack, returns home. He left Gilead 20 some odd years ago after a life full of ne'er do well tricks and thievery. This time he had impregnated a young farm girl and left her to fend for herself. His sister Glory, is 38 and returns home to care for her Papa, Rev Broughton. She and Jack are two of the eight children in the family. Glory returns after a dalliance with a man whom she found to be married and who borrowed much of her savings. She returns home because of duty and love but she does not return home willingly. She is the only child it seems who can care for Papa. He has had a stroke and needs his family. His wife had died years ago.
Glory and her father fared well, a daily life of chores and caring, boring really. Into this life comes Jack, looking or running from what we are not sure. This is a family who keeps things to themselves. Papa is a man of great moral value, a retired Presbyterian minister. His closest friend is Rev Ames the Congregational minister. Both are in their 70's now. Jack and Glory slowly start to talk, neither divulges much at first. Glory had always loved Jack, but as the youngest she felt she did count for much. Jack came home disheveled and drunk. The last 20 years have been filled with pain, love and dysfunction. He came home wondering if he could turn his life around. His question to both Rev Ames and Rev Broughton centered on whether he was predestined to go to hell. It is only Lila, Rev Ames wife who finally tells him, that yes, people can change. Jack's life is filled with disappointment, he loves a woman named Della, but his letters to St Louis are returned to sender without being opened. His life seems aimless, no job, no future, drowning his sorrows in alcohol. Glory shows him love, respect and caring. But to Jack that is not enough. He comes home to help care for his father, but he has always felt estranged from his family, never a part of it. He always came in the back door not the front. He tries desperately to become one of the family,and he is welcomed by his sister, father and his brother, Teddy, who stops in for a visit. But, to Jack, it is never enough.
Religion plays a large part in this book. There is kindness and generosity in the town and family. Forgiveness from Rev Broughton, who has always felt that he failed his son. And, Jack feels he has failed everyone. Certainly, alcohol has played its part but that is not all of it. We try to piece everything together. The novel is one of friendship, family and aging. And, at the heart of it all is love. 'Home is where the heart is'.
Highly, Highly Recommended. prisrob 04-25-09
Housekeeping: A Novel
Gilead: 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 Balm for Failure: a Fugue
Summary: 5 Stars
Marilynne Robinson is a writer of great intellectual daring and great control. To have risked all she had won on Gilead by returning to the characters and places she already has used, and to place it all again on a bet that Christianity and traditional family structure will speak to us today: it is an act of moral courage. Readers of her very demanding essays will find here (as in Gilead) a light touch with language, but it is light - never light-weight - for a purpose, which is to both present and support her theme in ways that are intreernally consistent with her characters.
Much has been made in other reviews of the theme of the Prodigal Son. But both Gilead and Home deal with sons and fathers in many ways, moving back and forth in variations on the theme [father-son; grandfather-father; grandfather-grandson; stepfather-stepson; and now brother-sister and finally brother-brother, which always must be about the father, too]. Sometimes looking at the Prodigal Son, yes; but sometimes at Abraham and Isaac, searingly in Home at Hagar and Ishmael; implicitly to God the Father and God the Son. Back and forth go the theme, with intermittent episodes that tie them together, often through the words of the Bible. As another reviewer here has written: vertically (over time)in Gilead, horizontally (through characters here); first person and memoirist (is that memory tobe trusted?) in Gilead; third person omniscient (but not omniscient enough to save her brother) in Home. Surely it is the fugue structure, and done with the lightness and grace of the masters.
But what is the resolution? Ms. Robinson may not be done with us yet, of course, but I think she is pointing the way, much more clearly in Home than in Gilead. In her own words (from her eassay, "Family", in The Death of Adam:
"The antidote to fear, distrust, self-interest is always loyalty. The balm for failure or weakness, even for disloyalty, is always loyalty." [Picador, NY: p.89]
Or, as she says early on in Home [FSG, NY: p 45], Glory speaking of her father,
"If you forgive, he [the Rev. Robert Boughton] would say, you may indeed still not understand, but you will be ready to understand, and that is the posture of grace."
So, consider again the Rev. John Ames giving Jack the Aaronic blessing at the end of Gilead- a scene not, of course, repeated here - and the final, luminous words of Home, raising the theme yet one more time through Jack's son, Robert:
"[H]e has answered his father's prayers.
"The Lord is wonderful."
Marilynne Robinson's writing, including her courage in having a point of view we see very little today, is a grace, too.
Mark J. Logsdon
Aptos, CA 95003
Book Review: RICK "SHAQ" GOLDSTEIN SAYS: "WAYWARD SON COMES HOME AFTER 20 YEARS... "A MAN OF SORROWS AND ACQUAINTED WITH GRIEF."
Summary: 3 Stars
This story takes place in small-town Gilead, Iowa in the 1950's. Aging patriarch and retired minister Robert Boughton the Father of eight grown children is dying. Glory Boughton one of the eight children comes "home" to care for her invalid widowed Father. Glory is thirty-eight-years-old, has a master's degree, taught high school English for thirteen years, and wonders... "What have I done with my life?" She also carries a deep secret inside... that would disappoint her Father. The books tarnished protagonist... is the transient alcoholic son... Jack. Jack left home twenty years ago after getting a girl pregnant... becoming a petty thief... alcoholism... and a strange self-imposed seclusion from an otherwise loving family. Over the twenty year period that Jack disappeared from his family, there were one or two times he requested money from Saint Louis. His brother Teddy who became a successful Doctor, even made multiple trips to Saint Louis to try to find his brother. Now Jack says he is coming home for a visit. Of course he doesn't show up the first time... and is late the second... and he has very little clothing... because he "lost" one of his suitcases. His arrival at the family home now occupied by his dying Father and his sister Glory is center stage of the saga.
The narrative is laid out in an extremely slooow moving manner, i.e., The Father needs to be helped out of the bed... Glory is making a meal... Jack is pulling weeds... dinner is served... they say grace... Father is tired needs to be helped back to bed... Jack says he's sorry... where has Jack been... ... Jack says he's sorry... has he been drinking... Jack says he's sorry... Jack quotes scripture... Father needs help to the table... Jack says he's sorry... Jack asks a question... Jack says he's sorry... Jack asks another question... Jack says he's sorry... Ad Nauseam.
One saving grace is the almost unspoken bond that develops between Jack and Glory, though it is developed through a repetitive tepid relationship that is almost always heavily interspersed with constant apologies by Jack. If the reader pays attention they will notice very minutely placed references to the racial struggle of the time, that are quickly and lightly passed over. An astute reader will know they must be attended to at some point. Potential readers should realize that this is not a book built around a core of action, and I can honestly say without the slightest exaggeration that I have never heard anybody say "I'm sorry" more than Jack in my entire life!