Marilynne Robinson

            My first experience with Marilynne Robinson was trying to read an essay in When I Was a Child I Read Books (2013). I knew that many people consider her essays thoughtful and even profound, but I couldn’t get through even one of them. Awkwardness and turgidity in her prose slowed me, and I gave it up. But I could hardly believe it was the same author when I began reading her fiction. In Housekeeping (1980) and Gilead (2004) she inhabits her narrators—the first a woman, the second a man—and lets them create worlds that are fascinating but very far removed from my experience.

            In Housekeeping, Ruth, the narrator, tells us on the first page that she and her sister Lucille were raised first by their grandmother, then by the grandmother’s sisters-in-law, and finally by the grandmother’s youngest daughter, their aunt Sylvia. Later we learn that Helen, the girls’ mother, deposited them at their grandmother’s house one Sunday morning while she was at church, and then drove her borrowed car off a cliff into the lake. We also learn that Sylvie was a transient before the sisters-in-law offered her her mother’s house—and the care of her two nieces.

When we learn that Sylvie’s and Helen’s older sister Molly left home to become a missionary in China, we see a pattern of opposing the stay-at-homes to the bolters—the grandmother died in the house her husband built when he came west, exchanging the sod house of his parents for a house he built himself on a hill, close to the mountains, in Fingerbone, presumably Idaho. All of the next generation were fiddle-footed, from the outright homelessness of Sylvie to the calling of a faraway vocation of Molly and the ultimate rejection of settled respectability in Helen.

            Sylvie’s “housekeeping” is eccentric: she hoards paper, eats out of a can with her fingers in the dark, sleeps with her clothes on, and generally lets the girls do what they want. This life drives Lucille away when she reaches high school, and she takes refuge in the house of a teacher in the town. When the town threatens to take Ruth away from Sylvie, she burns the house down and the two of them go on the road.

            The voice of Ruth as narrator makes all of this not only believable, but commonplace, in the way that children accept their world as the way things are, however outré others might think it. But Ruth’s voice is not commonplace when she remembers or describes the light, the ubiquitous water, the snow, and the cold of her world.

            Robinson did not publish a second novel for twenty-four years. In Gilead (2004), John Ames, a third-generation Congregationalist preacher, begins to write a letter to his son, who is seven. At the age of 76, John III has been diagnosed with angina and believes he may die at any time. He tells several interwoven family stories. His own is a life of poverty and loneliness for the most part. An early marriage ends with the death of his wife in childbirth and the death of the child soon after. Then, when John is 67, a young woman named Lila begins to attend his church each week, is baptized, and eventually asks him to marry her.

John III also writes about his grandfather, a violent Christian who probably killed people in abolitionist raids with John Brown. John I was a chaplain who lost his right eye in the Civil War and who incited his congregation from the pulpit to join up and fight. His son John II was in the First World War but became a pacifist. One of John III’s most vivid memories is traveling with his father to find his grandfather’s grave, a pilgrimage of filial piety in expiation for a rift between John II and his father that was never healed and resulted in John I leaving Gilead and dying elsewhere.

John III’s old, dear friend is Boughton, a Presbyterian minister whose congregation and family grew while John was less fortunate. Boughton’s son, named John Ames Boughton after his friend, was a wild child and seduced a poor town girl when he was in college, deserting her and the resulting child. John III cannot forget this incident, and when John Boughton comes back to Gilead, John III thinks the younger man is baiting him when he asks, for example, whether one’s early evil acts show that one is predestined for hell. But Boughton has changed and is genuinely tortured by this question. His main concern is that he has a common-law wife who is black and a five-year old son, but Boughton has been rejected by the girl’s family and is afraid his own father will not approve of his actions. He does not tell his father, even when the old man is dying, but he does tell these things to his namesake, John Ames

There is no resolution to these matters; the narrator tells us at the end, after expressing his hopes for his son, that he will pray and then he’ll sleep, echoing Lear’s line. Robinson inhabits John Ames as convincingly as she did Ruth in Housekeeping. Sometimes I wondered whether Ames is a saint. At other times I wondered how he could be such a fool. I suspect these are exactly the reaction she intended.

I haven’t read either of Robinson’s other novels. The consensus seems to be that these fist two are her best. The next two continue with the families introduced in Gilead. Perhaps I’m afraid of being disappointed: Housekeeping and Gilead are so very good.