Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

I had a headache that lasted several days. When I mentioned I was reading a book by a living writer, a friend said check if my headache’s a tumour, that’s an abrupt personality change(?). 

1/ Gilead feels like a strange book to read immediately after the Odyssey, not only because it was published in 2004, but also because it’s rather plotless. Actually, let’s avoid that word—I don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of defining plot and plotless novels. Gilead is what people call a quiet novel, slow and meditative. It is a journal by John Ames, a 76-year-old and dying preacher, for his 7-year-old son to read years later: telling stories about their family and pondering about the past and the future, about God and the Scripture, about life and death, about meaning and the act of living. 

That doesn’t mean that it’s boring though. The novel is set in the 1950s; John Ames writes about the conflict between his abolitionist grandfather and pacifist father, and between his preacher father and atheist brother; he writes about his first wife Louisa, who died in childbirth together with their baby Rebecca; and the novel becomes more intriguing, if not exciting, with the return of old Broughton’s son, John Ames Broughton (yes, his namesake), usually called Jack. 

The writing and protagonist are both more compelling than in Stoner (a “quiet novel” I didn’t finish that lots of people like, for some reason). 

I like Marilyn Robinson’s prose: 

“That graveyard was about the loneliest place you could imagine. If I were to say it was going back to nature, you might get the idea that there was some sort of vitality about the place. But it was parched and sun-stricken. It was hard to imagine the grass had ever been green. Everywhere you stepped, little grasshoppers would fly up by the score, making that snap they do, like striking a match.” 

This is rather different from the kinds of prose I usually like (Dickens, Melville, R. L. Stevenson, Flannery O’Connor, etc), so I’m not quite sure what I like about it: 

“Boughton was slow getting his growth. Then, after a short childhood, he was taller than me for about forty years. Now he’s so bent over I don’t know how you’d calculate his height. He says his spine has turned into knuckle bones. He says he’s been reduced to a heap of joints, and not one of them works. You’d never know what he once was, looking at him now.” 

I guess what I like is the tone of voice of the narrator: 

“Now, this might seem a trivial thing to mention, considering the gravity of the subject, but I truly don’t feel it is. We were very pious children from pious households in a fairly pious town, and this affected our behavior considerably. Once, we baptized a litter of cats. […] 

Their grim old crooked-tailed mother found us baptizing away by the creek and began carrying her babies off by the napes of their necks, one and then another. We lost track of which was which, but we were fairly sure that some of the creatures had been borne away still in the darkness of paganism, and that worried us a good deal. […] 

I still remember how those warm little brows felt under the palm of my hand. Everyone has petted a cat, but to touch one like that, with the pure intention of blessing it, is a very different thing. It stays in the mind. For years we would wonder what, from a cosmic viewpoint, we had done to them. It still seems to me to be a real question. There is a reality in blessing, which I take baptism to be, primarily. It doesn’t enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is a power in that. I have felt it pass through me, so to speak. The sensation is of really knowing a creature, I mean really feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time…” 

2/ Now some of you might wonder how such a religious novel could appeal to someone like me. I came across a Goodreads review saying that Gilead would have been a better book if the narrator were not a minister but a farmer, entrepreneur, or labourer. That would have been a different book, and don’t such books already exist? It’s because John Ames is a minister, a man of faith that he ponders about sin and judgement and grace and forgiveness, and tortures himself over his own shortcomings and suspicions. 

Occasionally John Ames’s musings about some particulars of Christianity don’t really hold my interest, but generally speaking, Gilead is not about religion and faith as much as about living and the choices we make. And about characters.

Take the scene where John Ames and his young wife are sitting with the Boughton family, and Jack asks him about the doctrine of predestination. 

“So I said, “That’s a complicated issue.” 

“Let me simplify it,” he said. “Do you think some people are intentionally and irretrievably consigned to perdition?”” 

This leads to a discussion, but the scene is not really about perdition or the doctrines of predestination and salvation in Christianity—even if you don’t care about Christianity and these concepts, it doesn’t matter—the scene is about the characters, about whether they think people can change, about things they say and things they leave unsaid. 

3/ One of the things I like about Gilead is that John Ames—well, Marilynne Robinson—gets us to think about the mysteries of people: 

“I wished I could sit at the feet of that eternal soul and learn. He did then seem to me the angel of himself, brooding over the mysteries his mortal life describes, the deep things of man. And of course that is exactly what he is. “For who among men knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of the man, which is in him?” In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. 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. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.” 

John Ames is talking about Jack, but that is also true about his grandfather and his father and his brother Edward and his young wife Lila and everyone else in the novel. Nobody is wholly good or wholly evil, nobody is entirely in the right or entirely in the wrong—Robinson gets you to have sympathy for all the characters, as John Ames writes about the conflict between the abolitionist grandfather and pacifist father, between the preacher father and atheist son—and at the heart of Gilead is that sense of mystery, that feeling that you could never truly understand another human being.  

And when the character of Jack Boughton unfolds as he and John Ames speak to each other and come to understand each other, Robinson gives us some very moving scenes. 

I don’t know if Gilead is going to be one of those books I live with, one of those books I revisit multiple times throughout my life, but I can see why it is that way with some readers. It is a very good book.