Housekeeping: Marilynne Robinson’s ‘Home’

Marilynne Robinson is an anomaly in the great tradition of American literature. One of our few novelists at peace with religion, she isn’t interested in the post-Puritanical game of unmasking hypocrisy, of entering into darkness.Unlike Hawthorne’s New England, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, or Cormac McCarthy’s Texas border country, Ms. Robinson’s Gilead comes luminously to life without the aid of chiaroscuro. There is much sadness, but little shadow. Spiritual as she is, Ms. Robinson is one of our least incantatory writers: The godlike view of America, so wonderfully elaborated by Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and even Toni Morrison, would violate the limits of Ms. Robinson’s hard-edged imagination.True, Gilead, a small Iowa town founded by radical abolitionists, has roots in the most traumatic divides of American history. But as it is dramatized, first in “Gilead” (2004) and now in “Home” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 336 pages, $25), the town is a peaceful place. We know little about it that does not directly concern the families of its two great preachers, John Ames and Richard Boughton. Rev.Ames, the more intellectual of the two, narrated “Gilead,” speaking in a voice that must be similar to that of his sermons, which he wrote in the spirit of “the deepest hope and conviction.” His voice in that novel was so warm and whole as to seem almost unreliable. But “Home,” told in the third person from the perspective of Rev. Boughton’s daughter, Glory, speaks a different language, one of wry femininity.Glory counterbalances Ames; her more worldly point of view corroborates Ames’s overly gracious interpretation of events. Her story is not happy, but it takes place in the same Gilead that readers of the earlier book seized upon: a Middle West suited to tranquil contemplation, a community of widely read divines who tend to their flocks and keep their feet on the ground.It is a fantasy, almost, one that appeals to fans of seriousness. But it is not a paradise. Ames’s book, written as a testament to his young son, proceeds at first by way of memory, offering episodes of difficult family history, lovingly reconsidered, for the reader’s moral pleasure, until events contemporaneous with Ames’s writing distract him and throw off the balance of his testament–and make it, indeed, a novel.The arrival of Jack Boughton is the worldly conundrum that animates both “Gilead” and “Home.” Christened John Ames Boughton and supposedly a godson to Ames, Jack was a reclusive, disobedient child, a rascal not lovable but mysterious and unsettling. And as an adult 40-something, returned to Gilead, he begs for theological clarifications with a doggedness at once sincere and fatalistic. He seems temperamentally closed to what Ames calls grace, and he tests the minister’s power of forgiveness. Neither Jack nor Ames is a hypocrite or a villain, and despite their failure to communicate, they love one another. Ms. Robinson makes us feel that they are both heroes, but “Gilead” is Ames’s book.“Home” is Jack’s. Because it is told in the third person, and because Jack’s sister Glory does not have Ames’s fertility of mind, this new book is less meditative than “Gilead.” If “Gilead” resembled a devotional text, “Home” is a play, a family drama set almost entirely on the ground floor of the Boughton home. Rev. Boughton is ailing, and often calls from one room to another, in need of assistance. Glory labors in the kitchen, trying to replicate her deceased mother’s recipes, and Jack is often coming downstairs, sometimes hungover, to lean on the kitchen counter, eager to help but sensitive to any perceived charity or slight. He dreads his father’s passive-aggressive forgiveness with an almost animal watchfulness.Glory, who over a period of weeks wins Jack’s trust with small acts of confession and loyalty, nevertheless sees an aloofness in him. She calls him feral, and fragile, and believes he “enforced a peculiar decorum on them all, even on their mother,” which, circularly, distanced Jack further from the family and confirmed him in his farouche lawlessness. A prankster and a petty thief, he committed his great sin when, as a college student, he impregnated a poor, inarticulate country girl and refused to acknowledge the child. Then, leaving behind his convertible as a sop to his father’s intense shame and disappointment, he disappeared for 20 years. A prodigal son, Jack becomes an obsession for his father, and his sudden reappearance elates and then disturbs the old preacher, who finds his troubled son basically unchanged.“Home” is not a sequel to “Gilead” so much as a companion, covering the same events and even replicating many lines of conversation, although it is interesting that Ms. Robinson has also altered a few things, implying that Ames’s memory was not perfectly objective. But most importantly, the new book travels the same theological ground as the first, now from the perspective of Jack. Jack knows the Bible — he has nearly memorized it, in prison — and wants to believe, so that he can finally stand up to his father and to Ames as an equal, a fellow believer. Ms. Robinson makes Jack’s complex psychology crystal clear, portraying him as tragically dysfunctional:He did understandable things for understandable reasons, answering expectation in terms that were startlingly literal, as if in him the skeletal machinery of conventional behavior, the extension and contraction of the pulleys of muscle and sinew, was all exposed. And he was embarrassed by it, inclined to pass it off, if he could, as irony, to the irritation of acquaintances and strangers, and, she could only imagine, employers and police.This self-consciousness, a form indeed of modern irony, may seem heroic to a reader of modern novels. But Jack is a psychological character trapped in a novel of ideas, and he therefore wonders if there could be something intrinsically wrong with him. In his theological arguments, he invokes the doctrine of predestination, always to the annoyance of Ames and Jack’s father. Jack pretends to be humble, but this is his great argument: that he was born faithless, unreceptive to grace.In bringing Jack to Gilead, Ms. Robinson draws on some of the situations from her first novel, “Housekeeping” (1980), a novel about rootlessness and the difficulty of inhabiting a home. Jack is therefore not alien to her basic temperament. But he is not her single champion, brought into Gilead in order to destroy it, to activate its underlying fissures or to aggravate its conscience — though his drinking does send his father sliding into dementia. He and Ames are duelists and true friends; Ames shines all the more brightly now that we fully understand the challenge that Jack presented. The faithfulness in “Gilead” is honed by the faithlessness in “Home.” These novels will be a bright spot in our literary history.blytal@nysun.com

Housekeeping: Marilynne Robinson’s ‘Home’

Housekeeping: Marilynne Robinson’s ‘Home’

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