The Best Books Club is back in session! January’s theme is “Family First,” and along with the three great selections in Chapter One of Back to the Best Books, I have a couple of remarkable novels to share by Marilynne Robinson, Gilead, and Home. Either novel would be a great choice for your book group.
There are a few authors I’d really like to meet, and Marilynne Robinson is one of them. She teaches at a famed writing workshop in Iowa, where her novels are set. She must have been busy, because she let 22 years go by between her first novel, Housekeeping, and her second, Gilead. Just three years later she published Home, and I have a hard time deciding which of the three I like best. Robinson’s novels are meditations on the meaty matters of life, like love and honor and faith and family. They are filled with conversation rather than action, yet one is never bored. (Well, almost never. I did get a bit antsy toward the end of the third novel, waiting for something to happen.) I’d like to meet Marilynne Robinson because, unlike most modern authors, she writes unapologetically about good people trying to do the right thing in life. She never shies away from questions of faith, doubt, or sin, even miracles, and yet her novels don’t seem “religious.” How does she pull off this delicate balancing act? That’s what I’d like to ask her.
The two latest novels, Gilead and Home, make an interesting pair. One is not a sequel of the other; they deal with the same events from two different perspectives. Gilead is an epistle; a letter from an ailing minister to the son of his old age. Aware that he will die before the boy reaches maturity, John Ames writes to him about his heritage, and his marriage to the boy’s mother, so much younger, and so different from himself. As he tells the story of his life, he attempts to share the lessons he has learned in his nearly eighty years. I know, it sounds preachy and dull, but it’s an exhilarating ride through a worthy life. The writing is so flawless that you forget about it, except for a kind of subliminal melody it seems to carry. Some prose actually sings, and this woman can really write. She captures the simple, no-nonsense voice of the midwestern minister, yet allows him a poetic grace that makes the words linger long after you read them. Here’s a sample from Gilead, as John tells of a journey he took with his father to find his grandfather’s grave, where they witnessed a miraculous display in the sky:
“I can’t tell you how I felt, walking along beside him that night, along that rutted road, through that empty world – what a sweet strength I felt in him, and in myself, and all around us… I have rarely felt joy like that, and assurance. It was like one of those dreams where you’re filled with some extravagant feeling you might never have in life, it doesn’t matter what it is, even guilt or dread, and you learn from it what an amazing instrument you are, so to speak, what a power you have to experience beyond anything you might ever actually need.” (Gilead, 48-49)
Reverend Ames has a lifelong friend, also a minister, named Boughton. The Boughtons are a large family, and in Home, the same events chronicled in Gilead are seen through the eyes of Glory Boughton, a spinster caring for the father of the clan as he edges toward death. Jack Boughton is the prodigal son in the family (every family has one, don’t they?) and his return is a key element in both novels. That’s all I’m going to tell you about the plots. Just read them both and send me your comments at www.backtothebestbooks.com . It’s a pleasure to recommend these books; I’m pretty sure you’ll love them.
Marilyn Green Faulkner oversees the Best Books Club, an informal gathering of bibliophiles that read and discuss the classics online. Her new book, Back to the Best Books: How the Classics Can Change Your Life, has 36 great selections for book groups and booklovers, and is available at amazon.com.
