Home: A Novel
by Marilynne Robinson
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Book Reviews of Home: A Novel
Book Review: One of the most tedious books I've read in a long time...
Summary: 2 Stars
I am, in general, a fan of Marilynne Robinson's fiction. I LOVED "Housekeeping", and I really enjoyed the slowly unfolding, engrossing "Gilead". But "Home" is, in my opinion, a major failure.
This novel rehashes one of the central conflicts of "Gilead" - the unforgivable sinning of Jack Boughton - from the point of view of his father and his sister, Glory. For 325 pages, Glory and Reverand Boughton worry about Jack, and Jack ruefully smiles and admits that he's tired of himself. Then, Glory makes coffee. There is more coffee made in this novel than in any book I have ever read.
I am a person who loves literary fiction, especially character-driven novels. I am not a reader who demands page turning action. But this book is so repetitive, and the conflict so slight, that it took all of my will power to finish reading it. Maybe I'm just too 21st century - I don't see why Jack is supposed to be so awful. Yes, he drinks; yes, he fathered a child out of wedlock. I know this novel is set in a place and time where these transgressions were more serious than they are today, but I got really tired of everyone acting like Jack had murdered people.
I give this book two stars because Robinson does have a way with description and with creating a sense of place. I did have sympathy for Glory, but really, it wasn't enough to salvage this boring book for me. I would recommend it as a sedative if you have trouble sleeping.
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.
Book Review: Achingly Beautiful
Summary: 5 Stars
Marilynne Robinson's new novel, _Home_ is achingly beautiful. Every sentence counts. Every word seems to have been sifted and weighed. The characters are drawn with a refinement and finesse rarely seen in fiction. There's not much action, but each action is lovingly expressed, and contributes to rich characterization. The book is a minimalist masterpiece.
_Home_ is not a sequel to _Gilead_. Rather, both novels take place over much the same stretch of weeks and months in the 1950s in a small farm town (Gilead) in Iowa, and have the same main characters. But _Gilead_ is told in the narrative voice of the elderly-and-dying minister John Ames, writing to his seven year old son, born to him so late in life. _Home_, on the other hand, is written from the vantage of Glory (the 30-something daughter of Ames's dying best friend and fellow pastor, Robert Boughton), apparently defeated by life and misplaced love. Both novels tell the return of Robert Boughton's ne'er-do-well son, John Ames Boughton. The prodigal returns. But has he? John Ames Boughton is one of the most complex and strikingly developed characters in fiction. The two novels see this return in very different ways.
If you have read Robinson's 2004 _Gilead_, expect to have your heart broken and mended all over again with _Home_. If you have not read _Gilead_, then read both.
Book Review: Coming back HOME to Gilead
Summary: 5 Stars
Four years ago, I briefly inhabited Marilynne Robinson's small world of Gilead and was the better because of it. Now she returns her readers to Gilead with a new meditative novel that, I'm pleased to say, is just about every bit as good as its prequel.
Set in the mid 1950s, Glory, the youngest daughter of the Boughton clan, returns home after a failed relationship to care for her father, the aging patriarch. Not long after, the prodigal son Jack (of GIlead fame) also returns after a 20-year "time in the wilderness" and sister and brother form a compassionate albeit uneasy bond. The novel focuses strongly on the meaning of home: home as a distinct place, home as a member of a family or a church, and most of all, creating a spiritual home.
Home addresses the big themes in life: forgiveness, grace, hope, and faith. But it's at its best when it focuses on the small themes of day-to-day family living and forging a bond between siblings and an aging parent when life has not gone as expected. It also presents a snapshot of life in the 1950s, when our nation created rationalizations for mistreatment of people of color.
Those who have not had the joy of reading Gilead will still find this to be a cohesive novel but for those who have, the feeling is nothing less than of arriving back home.