Home: A Novel
by Marilynne Robinson
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Book Reviews of Home: A Novel
Book Review: if you loved GILEAD.....
Summary: 5 Stars
You will adore HOME. Fans of Robinson's Pulitzer Prize winning novel GILEAD fell in love with her gentle minister, the Rev. John Ames, and the story he was creating for his son. Set in the 1950's, GILEAD is a love letter from the 77 year old Ames to his 7 year-old son. This luminous, tender book was completely outside the realm of what some might expect from a modern best-selling novel. Robinson shattered the mold with GILEAD.
In HOME, Robinson takes readers back once again to this quite Iowa town. It is still the 1950's. John Ames still has a bad heart. But he's alive and enjoying life with his young wife and child. HOME is not a sequel. It's more of a companion volume to GILEAD and while reading the first book first would certainly enhance the reader's appreciation for HOME, doing so is not essential.
HOME is a story about the best friend of John Ames, the Rev. Robert Boughton, and his family. John Ames is definitely part of the story but in a more peripheral sense. These two elderly ministers grew up together. They have argued scriptural fine points for the better part of a century. Rev. Boughton's health is failing now too, much faster that his friend's is declining.
Rev. Boughton's 38 year-old daughter Glory has come home to care for her father. Boughton has been a widower for 10 years. The Boughtons had seven children. Rev. Boughton's favorite child, Jack, is the black sheep of the family. He hasn't been home in 20 years. As the story opens they have just heard that Jack is coming home for a visit with his ailing father.
The prodigal son finally turns up. Jack is a man with a mysterious past. He is also one of the most compelling fictional characters this reviewer has encountered in years.
Robinson spins her magic as father, brother, and sister play out the drama of this homecoming. HOME is pure gold. Robinson writes with a warmth and assurance that will bring tears to your eyes. Will this one win another Pulitzer? It's good enough. Time will tell. HOME will resonate with readers who understand the joys and sorrows of being part of a family.
Book Review: Coming Home
Summary: 5 Stars
"What does it mean to come home?"
Marilynne Robinson poses the question and her book suggests how complex that wish may be. Jack, the prodigal son and favored child of the 8 children of a small town minister in Iowa in the mid 1950s returns home after a 20 year flight. He is an alcoholic and a self proclaimed thief, who has spent time in jail and seems to exist via " the kindness of strangers" as another book memorably posits, as well as odd jobs and kind women.
This is a book that freely uses words like perdition and scoundrel and amazingly it sounds perfect. Jack's father, now dying is cared for by the other central character, Glory, the youngest daughter. Now 38, she has come home after an 8 year engagement and years of teaching school. Her fiancé has left with her money and hopes.
If it all sounds grim and boring, don't buy the book. If you do, you will find yourself totally in the world of this house, and these people. Yet Robinson's gift, and it truly is a gift is that she takes the mundane and prosaic and enriches it with themes that are universal yet searingly specific to our lives today. Glory's attempts to connect with her brother are as touching and real as his retreat into irony to hide his searing pain.
Their father says to Jack "What I'd like to know, is why you didn't love us. That is what has always mystified me." And Glory reflects "Oh, it was the loneliness none of them could ever forget, that wry distance, as if there were injury for him in the fact that all of them were native to their life as he never could be."
Families, forgiveness, home and connections. Like her earlier book, Gilead, this is a book for the ages.
Book Review: Home is a story of family, father and son, brother, and sister
Summary: 5 Stars
Robinson won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel "Gilead." Here, she returns to those characters, in a story of the prodigal son. Gilead, Iowa is still the setting, but the characters move from John Ames' home and family, to that of his old friend, Robert
Boughton. Boughton, a former minister, like Ames, is dying, and his youngest daughter Glory has returned home to care for him. Glory's life has been successful on the surface, having earned her Master's Degree, and been a teacher for number of years, but feels unfulfilled. Her brother, Jack, the father's favorite, has returned home after a 20-year exile, having originally fled the town after getting a young girl pregnant. In his return, Jack's hoping for reconciliation with his father and trying to put his previous dissolute life behind him. Glory is conflicted over the return, wanting her father to end his life at peace with his son, yet concerned if Jack can maintain his new current behavior. Gilead was a novel of generations, following several members of the Ames family, from the Civil war into the 1950s. Home is a story of family, father and son, brother, and sister. Glory and Jack need to be able to share their stories with each other, and slowly they do. Robert and Jack find new common ground, reflecting both the reconciliation of the prodigal son with his father, but also what happens after the fatted calf is eaten, and father and son find a gap in their lives, experiences and expectations. A wonderful story; slow paced, emotionally moving. Robinson is a spectacular writer, and the dichotomy of the two novels shows her range in handling family relationships, over the generations and within one.
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: As near perfect a companion...
Summary: 5 Stars
...to Gilead as one could hope for. And hope, it seems to me - hope realized, hope deferred, hope in spite of reality - is at the core of this book. I saw this book at an airport bookstore and as soon as I saw that it returned to Gilead (didn't even finish reading the jacket), I purchased it. However, it took me some time to open it, because frankly I was afraid that it might not be as good as Gilead, that something from the perfection of that book might be ruined in the attempt to return there.
I needn't have worried, nor should you, if you read and loved Gilead. The perfect ambiguity of Gilead's ending is preserved, and we learn more about all the characters that were most real to me - Robert, Glory, and Jack. We meet characters only alluded to previously, and what a wonder they are! As others have noted, it is a slow, deliberate novel - though certainly wordier and less spare than Gilead. But it is a slow, deliberate story, and one to take your time with.
And hope - we always return to it. What hope and wonder are displayed in this little book, even in the midst of alcoholism, depression, small-town drama, racial conflicts, dementia. Don't be confused, however, but it's not romantic, sentimental and syrupy hope. It is deeply, profoundly, faithful hope - more like what John Ames describes at the end of Gilead: "...whatever hope becomes after it begins to weary a little, then weary a little more." A good ending can make a novel, and this one casts a wonderful vision.