Marilynne Robinson: Gilead
$170
Marilynne Robinson’s 2004 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead appears as one long and intimate letter from an aging father, the Reverend John Ames, to his young son. The letter is an accounting for Ames’s one life, lived essentially always in one Midwestern place, and the letter opens doors onto lives and times often more dramatic than his own, including lives that intersect with national crises like the Civil War, the influenza pandemic of 1918, and two world wars; lives that begin, pass through his own, and end; and lives destined to go on once he’s gone. Through it all, as a character, Ames has often been described in the way critic James Wood does in The New Yorker: He’s “gentle, modest, loving, and above all good.” No lie here. But there’s more to Ames than his gentleness and goodness, just as there is more than cruelty in Ames’s namesake, Jack Boughton, the prodigal son of his longtime friend Robert Boughton, himself an old minister coming near the end.
Gilead proposes a sort of truth—about the essential mystery of each of its characters, and the essential mystery of each of ourselves, its readers—while offering us a way to read it. “In every important way we are such secrets from each other,” Ames tells his son. “Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable—which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live.”
Over four weeks, we’ll take up the great human struggle and great hope of Gilead. Here is a book whose central figure acknowledges that our shared history “could make a stone weep,” concedes that some meaning is simply beyond words, proposes that too much admiration for existence makes existence difficult to properly enjoy, calls a curse the generosity that allows us to see through and into one another, and presents as our common trouble “the inviolable, untraversable and utterly vast spaces between us.” Nevertheless, this great possibility remains for Ames and for us: “There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.”
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