Home: A Novel
by Marilynne Robinson
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Book Reviews of Home: A Novel
Book Review: Can You Go Home Again?
Summary: 5 Stars
When Glory Boughton returns home to Gilead to care for her ailing father, she carries with her the regrets and fantasies of a life of her own - now abandoned. But soon after her return to the old homestead, her prodigal brother Jack writes a letter, announcing that he, too, is on his way home.
After more than twenty years gone, she barely recognizes him - and a part of her resents his return, coming as it does at a time when the old man needs this connection so badly. But as time passes, she and Jack come to a deeper understanding of each other, revealing some of their own secrets that neither is eager to share with anyone.
Caring for their father together, fixing up the old homestead, which has become quite neglected in the past few years, they seemingly form a team...Protecting each other against the harshness of the life here, which remains the same, with the Reverend Ames sitting in judgment and the town folk glancing sidelong at Jack as if they half-expect him to steal from them...This is the reputation Jack once held, and his twenty-year abandonment of the family and any ties to this community, somehow reinforces this view. And Jack, self-deprecatory and doing nothing to eradicate the image the townspeople hold of him, continues in his quiet way to try to make some kind of amends - on the home front and with the minister. Their father, too, a former minister, holds many beliefs that cast someone like Jack in a "sinner" role.
Slowly, the author peels away the layers that conceal the sadness and loss carried by these two, as they walk along the old familiar paths in the town and as they fall into the humble patterns of their youth in this home that is filled with memories of a time long ago...
Dreams and loves and fantasies have been cast aside. In many ways, it seems as if these two people are sacrificing some other life to be here, caring for the old man, who barely recognizes them at times. And as the days and weeks pass, it becomes clear that, despite the moments of reconnection, time has not healed all the old wounds and the future is not what they expected...
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gilead: A Novel comes Home: A Novel, Ms. Robinson's latest triumphant chronicle of the homey things that conjure up memories of long-ago times.
Book Review: A veil and a vale of tears
Summary: 1 Stars
I am not going to repeat the plot, since many other reviewers have done so very competently. First let me say I am a Robinson fan. I think Gilead is one of the top ten books I have ever read. So imagine my disappointment when I finally found myself on the last page of Home, and closed the book with utter relief.
I believe that in Home, Robinson lost the writer's discipline she exercised so marvelously in Gilead. The characters never come to life. Jack is a kind of under-stated caricature of the "black-sheep" trying to redeem himself. I did not find him believable. He seemed to be another Ames/Boughten lightly clothed in the garb of a sinner. He was too decent, apologetic, and insightful to be any kind of black-sheep I have ever met. Glory is a caricature of the left-behind woman. She is allegedly intelligent and educated, and yearns for a different life, but for some reason is paralyzed and incapacitated. Both Jack and Glory seem almost embalmed in amber - but it is never clear why, and this is why the characters do not come alive for me. (Predestination?)
Beyond character development, there is dialogue, scene, and plot. On the matter of the first, the dialogue is fantastically tedious. Glory cries. Jack says he is sorry ad nauseum. On scene, there is just about one scene in the entire book. It is more like a play than a novel. The characters migrate from kitchen to bed to barn to living room, over and over again, with almost nothing changing each time the scene is revisited. Jack says something; it bothers his father; Jack apologizes; Glory weeps. Good grief. On plot, the prodigal son arrives sinful, he continues to sin, and he leaves a sinner. The father loves the son at the beginning, at the middle, and then loses his faculties so .. it is unclear. Glory forgives in the first part of the book, and then forgives and forgives and forgives. Let's have a blow up!!! The lack of confrontation and crisis left this book going absolutely nowhere. The potential (albeit at the end of the book) for something great to take place, when Jack's African American wife arrives, is totally forfeited and the plot collapses before it even begins.
My feeling throughout this book was that Robinson was not ready to write her next book, and wrote this painfully during some terrible attack of writer's block. Anyone who could write Gilead will live to write another great novel. I await it, with all the eagerness I awaited Home.
Katie Cameron
Book Review: For a particular sort of reader
Summary: 3 Stars
If you like to discuss the finer points of theology (especially predestination and grace), or if you (like me) grew up in a home that never engaged in a single honest discussion, you'll appreciate this book. Jack, the sinner and prodigal son in a small-town pastor's family (as he was in Gilead), is the cause for and a participant in a "plot" centered around Christian doctrine and awkward family interaction.
The character of Jack kept me reading Home, and I went back to read Gilead again. It is an interesting literary tack, to approach a story from two different vantage points. I'm not really sure I would read a book arising from a third character's viewpoint -- I've really had enough of the Boughton family at this point -- but several characters were thrown away who were far more interesting to me than Jack, Glory, Robert Boughton and Ames. Give us more of Lila and Della!
Although Jack's "sins" were so artistically drawn as to be amusing, at least I got a feel for what it's like to be so different from one's family of origin that you never feel you belong. It's a shame that in this brand of small American town, especially in the time period the author has chosen, people aren't allowed to express their individuality without being labeled miscreants and feel that rebelling is their only recourse.
I guess I'm also a child of my time when all I could think while reading the book was "Jack, get thee to an AA meeting!" The whole family is dysfunctional and needlessly alienating. Jack's actions aren't their fault and it isn't their job to fix him. This particular loving home is so claustrophobic that I don't blame Jack for fleeing.
I also thought it cowardly of Jack's sister Glory not to own up to her own deceptions, leaving Jack to hang out there as the family whipping boy. And the father's deathbed pleasure in hearing Jack say he didn't feel he deserved to call his father Papa or any name the other children used, was creepy to me. Do Jack's personality or life choices make him any less a son? That's not the doctrine of grace the book makes so much of.
That being said, the book's theme of reconciliation is a powerful one for those who long to return to the fold. We all need a place we can call home. And it's worth examining why we feel the pull to return to it, no matter how imperfect it is.
Book Review: A Great American Novel
Summary: 5 Stars
How Fiction Works
Marilynne Robinson's "Home" is an extraordinary novel, a great novel, in the tradition of Hawthorne and
Melville and Faulkner. It is a very different sort of novel, in fact one critic really just dismissed it, but it could and will stand with the work of these earlier writers. It is a study of those who have remained in or returned to small town America; namely the Boughton family, and to a lesser degree than in the earlier "Gilead" the Ames family. The novel takes place in the summer in Gilead in Iowa where the days unfold in the old Boughton house in a fifties world where church is at the heart of the matter, where one knows what the neighbors are up to, where the coffee comes from the pot on the stove and there are dumplings with the chicken dinner, where there are no blacks on the streets. Jack Boughton returns after a twenty years absence to the house where his sister Glory has come to take care of her father, the "old man," a minister, who has, like many approaching death, a lot he wishes to settle. Here in the old house, a wonderful house with garden, and barn, and great shade trees, and of course their memories of childhood, Jack and Glory and their father manage to get through the days that proceed one after another as though nothing has happened, as though nothing will. And yet the reader cannot rest. Little by little, here and there, secrets are revealed, bits of the past are brought forward, like so many doors opening a crack, then closing. I don't think I have ever read a novel in which so much is said but one feels so few words have been spoken, where so much heartbreak has been recorded in a strange sort of stillness. Robinson writes about familial love, forgiveness, betrayal, guilt, an awful kind of lifelong estrangement, and such loneliness and disappointment. She looks at the wounds, and in an odd way manages to create in the reader a sense of having been wounded too. But then at the very end of the novel Jack gone, his father a day or so from death, we are left with Glory, looking down the road into the dusk, still believing, as do we, that good may come. It is a novel that is totally original, with deep deep roots in the history of American literature.
Book Review: He Lives Evil, Eh?
Summary: 5 Stars
This novel succeeds admirably at several levels. First, it explores at least one basic theological question. Also, it illustrates that such questions are sometimes answered more successfully by lay persons than by clergy.
In addition, the novel portrays well the diminishing strength of an elderly parent and its differing effects on various members of the younger generation. And it provides fascinating insight into adult sibling relationships.
And, not at all least for this reader, it provides some moving nostalgia for a hymn-singing childhood. It is beside the point that such recollections are quite likely distorted and optimized memories of what for the older generation was a more disturbing time. As a matter of fact, perhaps that is one of the points.
The theological question which most intrigued this reader is finally put into words on page 225 of my edition: "Are there people who are simply born evil, live evil lives, and then go to hell?" As one might surmise upon seeing the question, the theories of John Calvin are treated occasionally in pursuing an elusive answer. To "live evil" would indeed provide an empirical and palindromic manifestation of Calvin's concept of man's total depravity.
It is unfortunate that author Robinson's skill and professionalism were not approached by those of her editors and her publisher. Annoying erroneous spellings survived, including one of the name of Larry Doby, the athlete who in 1947 became the first black baseball player in the American League, second only to Jackie Robinson in all of major-league baseball.
Also related to civil rights, one of the novel's undercurrent themes, is the attribution of Birmingham's infamous fire hoses to another Alabama city, Montgomery, which had managed to secure its own adverse reputation without resorting to those particular weapons. Birmingham's pleasure at not being remembered probably exceeds that of Larry "Dobie" for being remembered at all.
But compulsive nit-picking aside, "Home" is an important and significant work, and may well bring another major prize for Robinson.