“I told you last night that I might be gone sometime…” (opening lines)
The quiet simplicity of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead overflows with a sacred sense of joy, hope, and sorrow all at once. This is a patient and poignant novel that offers a unique perspective, rarely heard in our present literary climate. For what Gilead lacks in plot, it makes up for in soul-enriching bounty. Told through a series of somber epistolary reflections –prayers, confessions, hopes, and fears– Gilead conveys the fictional autobiography of Reverend John Ames, a congregationalist minister who has spent almost his entire life in Gilead, Iowa (a fictional small town named after the Biblical locale meaning “hill of testimony” taken from Genesis 31:21 –it is based on the southwestern Iowa town of Tabor, renowned for its role in the abolitionist movement). Reverend Ames left Gilead only once to attend seminary before becoming a minister like his father and grandfather before him. Now at age seventy-six, Ames has been diagnosed with a heart condition (“angina pectoris”) which will soon end his life. He struggles with pains and insomnia, often walking around town in the middle of the night, marveling at the inexplicable gift of one more day of life on earth. Burdened with the knowledge of his own demise, Reverend Ames is anxious about his mortality. He wrestles with the impermanence of life, lamenting an imperfect legacy he will leave behind for his wife Lila and their nearly seven-year-old son –he fears he is abandoning them “naked to the word.”
This beautifully evocative novel –rife with Calvinist theology– is told via a string of journalistic letters addressed to Ames’s young son, with the intent that he read them upon entering adulthood. Throughout the course of these letters, we learn a great deal about Ames’s life. He was born in 1880 (the current year in which he writes the letters is 1956). His grandfather was a slightly eccentric, one-eyed Civil War veteran who fought for the Union Army before immersing himself in radical abolitionist activities (particularly in the violent “Bleeding Kansas” struggle over whether the state would become a free or slave state). He was also affiliated with John Brown prior to the start of the war. However, Ames’s father held deep disagreements with his father over the issue of slavery. Both were opposed to slavery, but Ames’s father was more of a pacifist, while his grandfather was a militant abolitionist –the two men quarreled until Ames’s grandfather angrily departed for Kansas. He died there shortly thereafter (an early anecdote in the novel recounts Ames’s dusty, dehydrated adventure as a young boy with his parents in search of his grandfather’s Kansas gravestone). The fact that Ames’s father and grandfather left things on such unsettled terms has left a lasting impression on Ames, and perhaps it is the catalyst for all the letters to his son.
Ames also has a brother named Edward, an intellectual who is ten years his senior. After Edward went away to study in Germany, he disavowed religion became an atheist. This caused much strain in the family as Ames’s parents forbade him from contact with his brother, and Ames grew up under a shadow of suspicion from his parents, wary of the faintest sign of Ames questioning his faith. In time, however, things were patched up in the family. Edward and his parents then left Gilead and its harsh, unforgiving climate for the warm, sunny shores of the Gulf Coast. At this point, we learn that Ames’s father, who was once “a fine, vigorous old man” apparently lost his faith. He claimed he could no longer bring himself to preach anymore and informed Ames that the family’s quaint, small-town life sat in him like a fading, distant memory. In spite of all this, Ames decided to remain in Gilead with its dwindling population and crumbling church (he confesses that his father always seemed to be disappointed in him).
When he was young, Ames had been married to a woman named Louisa. He says very little about her except that she became pregnant but tragically died during childbirth along with the baby when Ames was in his twenties. Ames says he was only able to hold his daughter for but a few moments before she died (her name was Rebecca, but she was also called “Angeline”). Ames offers a few scattered sorrowful remarks on his late daughter throughout the book:
“If Rebecca had lived, she’d be fifty-one, older than your mother is now by ten years. For a long time I used to think how it would be if she walked in that door, what I would not be ashamed, at least, to say in her hearing. Because I always imagined her coming back from a place where everything is known, and hearing my hopes and my speculations the way someone would who has seen the truth face-to-face and would know the full measure of my incomprehension” (20).
This grief-stricken tragedy led to a prolonged “dark time” in Ames’s life –a period of intense loneliness and introspection wherein he spent considerable hours in his study reading and writing voluminously (he claims to have written at least as much as St. Augustine). Thanks to his brother, Ames has also read and appreciated the writings of atheistic thinkers like Feuerbach. In fact, much of Ames’s money has been spent amassing a substantial personal library filled with books he will never read. And he has also lost a great deal of money by lending it out to various people in town who can never hope to repay him. Like Santiago in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Reverend Ames considers himself a lifelong fan of baseball (he once injured his crooked finger playing baseball in his twenties). Baseball has served as a key outlet of hope, heroism, and escapism for Ames, especially during his “dark time.”
As time passed in Ames’s life, in the same way that nature has been reclaiming the overgrown streets of Gilead, hope still finds its way to Ames again in the most unexpected way. On one rainy Pentecost, a woman walks into his congregationalist church to escape the storm:
“Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday. It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain. You can feel the silent and invisible life. All it needs from you is that you take care not to trample on it. And that was such a quiet day, rain on the roof, rain against the windows, and everyone grateful, since it seems we never do have quite enough rain” (20).
From here, Ames and Lila begin spending more time together –he baptizes her and she works on his home garden before boldly suggesting that they get married. Ames describes her informal proposal as one of the most exhilarating and profound experiences of his life. And in time, a miracle Ames once thought impossible occurs –they have a baby boy together.
In Gilead, we also meet the Boughton family, whose family patriarch is an aging, arthritic, curmudgeon named Reverend Robert Boughton, a retired Presbyterian minister. In his younger years, Boughton was an impressive man and an inspiring preacher. As Ames says: “Boughton was always a good-hearted man, but his discomforts weary him, and now and then he says things he really shouldn’t. He isn’t himself” (29). Boughton’s daughter Glory has recently returned home following a failed marriage. And shortly thereafter, we also meet Boughton’s son, John Ames “Jack” Boughton –a troubled, wayward boy who was given Ames’s namesake as a friendly gift from Boughton after Ames lost his wife and child. However, Ames has since become distrustful of young Jack. He advises his own son to be wary of Jack. For about twenty years, Jack has been away in St. Louis. Prior to that, while in college, he slept with a young girl who lived in squalid poverty (when Ames once visited her family home, he found it disgusting as it was surrounded by broken glass, garbage, and dirty mattresses). The result of Jack’s ill-fated sexual liaison was the delivery of a baby girl who was then unfortunately abandoned by Jack. The baby girl then tragically died at the age of three stemming from an infectious cut on her foot. For this, Ames has been unable to forgive Jack. “And I do feel a burden of guilt toward that child, that man, my namesake. I have never been able to warm to him, never” (188). Though Ames is careful to quickly walk back this harsh statement.
Nevertheless, guided by Ames, our initial impression of Jack is one of distrust. He is described as a “lost sheep” and a “lost coin” and a “prodigal son” with “precocious charm” –Jack “is not a man of the highest character. Be wary of him” (125). However, since in Gilead, Marilynne Robinson continually reminds readers of a divinely mysterious ocean of depth lying beneath each person, Jack’s secret is eventually revealed. He has married an African American woman and they have a beautiful young son together, but in an age of state-sponsored racism and rigid anti-miscegenation laws, they have been forced apart. She has since gone back to Tennessee to be with her family which has left Jack deeply conflicted –should he follow her to Tennessee in spite of her family’s wishes? Should he simply return to St. Louis? Or should he remain in Gilead? The struggle to find a safe place to call home is plaguing poor Jack. For resolution to these unanswered questions, he turns to Reverend Ames –and our protagonist learns one final lesson of judgment and forgiveness.
In spite of feeling out of place for much of his life, Reverend Ames has learned the importance of rootedness. He embraces connection to the people and places in his life. Like his love of baseball games, he has finally found his way around the diamond and back home again (i.e. Gilead is his journey to “home base”). He holds a deep love for the prairie, its history and culture, as well as its molasses pace of life. The music of Robinson’s prose invites readers to embrace an unhurried cadence as the novel unravels an immense trove of beauty found in seemingly ordinary things –a soap bubble floating through the air, lawn sprinklers causing a rainbow, sunrise through the window, a patiently growing garden, dust that falls off a bible in church. All of these and so many other moments challenge us to witness an ecstatic view of common things –making the mundane sing with sacred joy and life-affirmation. Gilead confronts us with a divine reality buried beneath the earthiness of the world, showing us that even wayward people like Jack can be worthy of redemption. As such, this is an explicitly Christian novel –inspired by the writings of John Calvin, but also other thinkers like Charles Sanders Peirce– and it presents us with a rich reminder of American regionalism, almost as if providing a gentle polemic against prevailing caricature of Christianity in American society. At any rate, Gilead is a novel free from postmodern irony and sarcasm. It is eminently approachable –like a hopeful ray of light for those who have known grief and hardship– and my advice to readers of Gilead is to simply slow down and saturate yourself in the subtlety of this splendid, heartwarming novel.
“While you read this, I am imperishable, somehow more alive than I have ever been.”
Notable Quotations:
“It seems ridiculous to suppose the dead miss anything. If you’re a grown man when you read this –it is my intention for this letter that you will read it then– I’ll have been gone a long time” (3).
“It is an amazing thing to watch people laugh, the way it sort of takes them over… I’m a dying man, and I won’t have so many more occasions to laugh, in this world at least” (5-6).
“There’s a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that. a lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you wouldn’t really expect to find it, either” (6).
“You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension” (7).
“I feel I am with you now, whatever that can mean, considering that you’re only a little fellow now and when you’re a man you might find these letters of no interest” (19).
“We were very pious children from pious households in a fairly pious town, and this affected our behavior considerably” (21).
“My list of regrets may seem unusual, but who can know that they are, really. This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it” (28).
“There is an earned innocence, I believe, which is as much to be honored as the innocence of children” (30).
“Here I was a pastor of souls, hundreds and hundreds of them over all those years, and I hope I was speaking to them, not only to myself, as it seems to me when I look back. I still wake up at night, thinking, That’s what I shoud have said! or That’s what he meant! remembering conversations I had with people years ago, some of them long gone from the world, past any thought of my putting things right with them” (41).
“I’d never have believed I’d see a wife of mine doting on a child of mine. It still amazes me every time I think of it. I’m writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you’ve done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God’s grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you” (52).
“While you read this, I am imperishable, somehow more alive than I have ever been, in the strength of my youth, with dear ones beside me. You read the dreams of an anxious, fuddled old man, and I live in a light better than any dream of mine –not waiting for you, though, because I want your dear perishable self to live long and to love this poor perishable world, which I somehow cannot imagine not missing bitterly, even while I do long to see what it will mean to have wife restored to me” (53).
“I’ve always envied men who could watch their wives grow old” (54).
“I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again” (57).
“How I wish you could have known me in my strength” (94).
“There are two insidious notions, from the point of view of Christianity in the modern world. (No doubt there are more than two, but the others will have to wait.) One is that religion and religious experience are illusions of some sort (Feuerbach, Freud, etc.), and the other is that religion itself is real, but your belief that you participate in it is an illusion” (145).
“‘I’m just trying to find a slightly useful way of saying there are things I don’t understand. I’m not going to force some theory on a mystery and make foolishness of it, just because that is what people who talk about it normally do'” (152).
“Adulthood is a wonderful thing, and brief. You must be sure to enjoy it while it lasts” (166).
“Well, I have had a certain amount of experience with skepticism and the conversation it generates, and there is an inevitable futility in it. It is even destructive. Young people from my own flock have come home with a copy of La Nausee or L’Immoaliste flummoxed by the possibility of unbelief, when I must have told them a thousand times that unbelief is possible. And they are attracted to it by the very books that tell them what a misery it is. And they want me to defend religion, and they want me to give them ‘proofs.’ I just won’t do it. Because nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense” (177).
“…I must say all this has given me a new glimpse of the ongoingness of the world. We fly forgotten as a dream, certainly, leaving the forgetful world behind us to trample and mar and misplace everything we have ever cared for. That is just the way of it, and it is remarkable” (191).
“Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations” (197).
“I’ll pray that you grow up a brave man in a brave country. I pray you will find a way to be useful. I’ll pray and then I’ll sleep” (247).
On The 2005 Pulitzer Prize Decision
In 2005, the two runners up for the Pulitzer Prize were An Unfinished Season by Ward Just, and War Trash by Ha Jin. Upon granting the prize to Gilead, the Pulitzer Prize offered the following description of the novel:
“This is also the tale of another remarkable vision–not a corporeal vision of God but the vision of life as a wondrously strange creation. It tells how wisdom was forged in Ames’s soul during his solitary life, and how history lives through generations, pervasively present even when betrayed and forgotten.”
The 2005 Pulitzer Jury was composed of:
- Rebecca Pepper Sinkler (Chair) is a lifelong Philadelphian, writer, and was the former editor of the The New York Times Book Review in the 1980s and 1990s.
- Marie Arana is a Peruvian-American writer and distinguished scholar who wrote for The Washington Post and served in various capacities for numerous cultural institutions, including The Library of Congress, The National Book Award, The Pulitzer Prize, and many others. She has written several books including a biography Simon Bolivar entitled Bolivar: American Liberator (2013).
- Alan Lightman is a distinguished physicist and professor at MIT who has written many books, including the international bestseller Einstein’s Dreams. Much of his work explores the intersection between science and the humanities.
Who Is Marilynne Robinson?
Marilynne Robinson was born in Sandpoint, Idaho in 1943. She attended Pembroke College, the former women’s college of Brown University. She was raised as a Presbyterian but later converted to Congregationalism after reading the works of John Calvin. Some critics have noted that many of her novels have a subtle polemical nature to them, pushing back against Max Weber’s interpretation of Calvinism. She completed a PhD from the University of Washington (her dissertation was on Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part II). She was a teacher at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop program from 1991-2016. In 1967, she married a writer and professor at University of Massachusetts-Amherst. They had two children together and then divorced in 1989. She wrote her celebrated debut novel Housekeeping (1980) while still a young mother as her boys slept. After it achieved early success thanks to a review in the New York Times (and the PEN/Hemingway Award) she spent over twenty years writing literary reviews and other nonfiction before returning to the same narrative with a sequel, Gilead (2004), which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and found praise among many literary critics ranging from reviewers in The New York Times and The Nation, to President Barack Obama’s list of favorite novels.
Today, she lives a reportedly solitary life in Iowa City, Iowa where she remains disciplined with her personal and intellectual curiosities, though her public career and former students often seem to prevent her from writing literature, as she occasionally likes to coyly remark. In the summers, she returns to upstate New York to tend to her grandmotherly duties, as well. To date, the books in the Gilead series are as follows: Housekeeping (1980), Gilead (2004), Home (2008), Lila (2014), and Jack (2020). She has also written books of nonfiction like The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998), Robinson’s theological and cultural reflections. Notably, Gilead was dedicated to her parents: “John and Ellen Summers.”
In 2008, Marilynne Robinson gave a delightful series of interviews to Sarah Fay of the Paris Review. In them, she discusses many things, such as her writing habits (dressing like a “bum” in sweats –unlike John Cheever who would wear a suit down to the basement of his building), typing on a computer versus writing longhand (Gilead was written with a mix of two, over a period of eighteen months, but Housekeeping was written longhand), the writings of Abraham Lincoln, Karl Marx, and Marguerite Navarre, the Albigensian Crusade, science, religion, beauty, and the best pie she ever baked (lemon meringue, a family tradition). Below are a memorable notable quotations from those interviews:
“Faith always sounds like an act of will. Frankly, I don’t know what faith in God means. For me, the experience is much more a sense of God. Nothing could be more miraculous than the fact that we have a consciousness that makes the world intelligible to us and are moved by what is beautiful.”
“No physicist can tell you why things persist as they are, why one moment follows another. The reality we inhabit and treat like an old shoe is amazingly arbitrary.”
“…I’m kind of a solitary. This would not satisfy everyone’s hopes, but for me it’s a lovely thing. I recognize the satisfactions of a more socially enmeshed existence than I cultivate, but I go days without hearing another human voice and never notice it. I never fear it. The only thing I fear is the intensity of my attachment to it. It’s a predisposition in my family. My brother is a solitary. My mother is a solitary. I grew up with the confidence that the greatest privilege was to be alone and have all the time you wanted. That was the cream of existence.”
“I worry that I’m not pessimistic enough. My own life is full of profound satisfactions, and I’m distracted from the fact that the world is not in good shape. I cherish time, for instance, and for the most part I have control over my time, which is a marker of a very high standard of living as far as I’m concerned.”
“People are frightened of themselves. It’s like Freud saying that the best thing is to have no sensation at all, as if we’re supposed to live painlessly and unconsciously in the world. I have a much different view. The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world… we should think of our humanity as a privilege.”
“At various times in my life I’ve bought a little finely ornamented volume with a clasp, and written a couple days’ worth of reflections. And then I come back to it and I think, What an idiot.” (When asked if she keeps a journal/diary).
“After I write a novel or a story, I miss the characters –I feel sort of bereaved.”
“…a mystical experience would be wasted on me. Ordinary things have always seemed numinous to me.”
“Science is amazing. On a speck of celestial dust, we have figured out how to look to the edge of our universe.”
“Religion is a framing mechanism. It is a language of orientation that presents itself as a series of questions.”
“You have to have a certain detachment in order to see beauty for yourself rather than something that has been put in quotation marks to be understood as ‘beauty’… At the same time, there has always been a basic human tendency toward a dubious notion of beauty. Think about cultures that rarify themselves into courts in which people paint themselves with lead paint and get dumber by the day, or women have ribs removed to have their waists clinched tighter. There’s no question that we have our versions of that now. The most destructive thing we can do is act as though this is some sign of cultural, spiritual decay rather than humans just acting human, which is what we’re doing most of the time.”
“Teaching is a distraction and a burden, but it’s also an incredible stimulus. And a reprieve, in a way.”
Robinson, Marilynne. Gilead: A Novel. Picador (Farrar, Straus and Giroux): Reprint edition, New York, NY. January 10, 2006.
Click here to read my review of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.
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