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| Shadows of failure |
| The Guardian |
‘Home’ is a novel of secrets, and a secretive novel says SARAH CHURCHWELL
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Marilynne Robinson has emerged, in a late apotheosis, as one of America’s greatest contemporar y novelists, with a career characterised by surprise and singularity. Robinson’s first novel, the dazzling Housekeeping, emerged seemingly out of nowhere in 1981 to prizes and plaudits; then she disappeared as a novelist for more than 20 years, in the interim teaching creative writing at the University of Iowa’s prestigious workshop and publishing two idiosyncratic nonfiction books. Suddenly, in 2004, came Gilead, her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, which astonished everyone by showing that a stubbornly theological novel could be a secular succès d’estime, and sell.
Now, a mere four years later, comes Home, Robinson’s third novel. Home is an unusual exercise: a companion to Gilead, not sequel but sibling, narrating the same, rather uneventful, events as that novel, but in the context of a different family history and from different perspectives. Gilead tells the story of the Reverend John Ames, a third-generation Congregationalist minister living in the tiny fictional town of Gilead, Iowa, 50 years ago. Ames, an old man facing death, writes Gilead as a testament to his young son, delineating his family history and offering rumination and advice. In the midst of Ames’s elegiac reminiscences suddenly appears his namesake, John Ames Boughton, the prodigal son of Ames’s best friend, who returns home for reasons that Ames views with suspicion. Jack Boughton is trouble, or so Ames believes, and the rest of the story concerns Ames’s struggles with doubt and redemption, interwoven with his memories of his father and grandfather.
Home retells Jack Boughton’s story from the point of view of his younger sister, Glory, who has reluctantly returned to Gilead at the age of 38 to care for her dying father, a Presbyterian minister and John Ames’s best friend. Jack, the family’s black sheep, an alcoholic with a dishonourable past, returns for reasons that he will only intimate (they are more fully disclosed in Gilead). Glory has secrets of her own: she was humiliated by a man to whom she thought she was engaged, but who turned out to be married.
Home is a novel of secrets, and a secretive novel: the three Boughtons withhold most of what they are thinking and feeling from each other, as they reside uneasily under the same roof. Jack’s secret is known to readers of Gilead but not to his family, and this obliquity is crucial to a story about the limitations of knowledge, and how that limitation determines our judgments of others.
In Gilead Ames observes that Jack always seems to see right through him; this makes Ames uncomfortable and resentful, because, he reflects, “these people who can see right through you never quite do you justice, because they never give you credit for the effort you’re making to be better than you actually are, which is difficult and well meant and deserving of some little notice.”
That effort is central to both books, and to their shifting perspectives: neither Jack Boughton nor John Ames credits the other with trying to be better than they are. Both novels concern our failures to transcend our own lesser natures, and the small, transient moments of grace when we succeed. But they also explore justice and judgmentalism, a theme that only emerges fully when the two novels are read together, as the characters judge and misunderstand each other. The fundamental question that troubles all of them is variously expressed: redemption, salvation, grace, predestination — or, as Ames’s wife puts it in decidedly more secular terms, whether people can change.
Gilead was a new kind of American epic, melding the supposedly masculine and supposedly feminine concerns of nationhood and family into one summative novel about what America was supposed to mean, returning us to its dark roots in battles over the relationship between church and state, white man and black, individual and nation, peace and war.
Home is less epic in its intentions, and thus rather less intellectually ambitious, and less profound, than Gilead. But if Home is less intellectually demanding, it is more emotionally demanding, and enriches and expands Gilead in unexpected ways.
The narrator of Home is omniscient, although it is told from Glory’s point of view; but the novel, like Glory, remains a little reserved, respecting Jack’s privacy perhaps a bit too much. That said, this reserve also creates the novel’s brutal emotional impact, and Home remains very much its own book, just as Jack is very much his own man. Home is almost frighteningly sad; where Gilead offers benediction, Home offers only valediction.
At the end of Home, Glory thinks of Jack in terms of the famous description of the Messiah as “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and as one from whom men hide their face.” Home is a book of sorrows, of disappointment, and of the fragile, improbable ways in which home, even when it is shadowed by failure and guilt, can offer hope.
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