Gilead (Oprah's Book Club): A Novel
Nearly 25 years after Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson returns with an intimate tale of three generations, from the Civil War to the 20th century: a story about fathers and sons and the spiritual battles that still rage at America's heart. In the words of Kirkus, it is a novel "as big as a nation, as quiet as thought, and moving as prayer. Matchless and towering." Gilead tells the story of America and will break your heart.
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Community Reviews
Background: The book's narrative is told by an elderly and ailing Congregationalist pastor who lost his first wife and child during labour. He remarried very late in life to a much younger woman. He is now 76 years old and with a 7-year-old son who he realizes he will not see grow to his teens or adulthood.
Plot/Premise: Gilead is largely plotless. This book takes the form of a letter from the narrator to his young son about his life and his observations on things around him. The letter is written in a non-chronological way. The present is small-town Iowa in 1956 but his reflections span a century back to the U.S. Civil War which his own grandfather participated in. The last third of the story often veers away from the narrator's own life and his messages to his son and spends some time focusing on Jack Boughton’s (the narrator's 43-year-old godson) and his observations of Jack from boyhood through to present.
Analysis: Major literary reviewers and the Pulitzer committee found the prose to be measured and thoughtful and they appreciated its philosophical musings. I didn't mind the jumping around in timeline back-and-forth from present to the time of the narrator's grandfather, the time of his father and the various stages of the narrator's life that occur with little discernible sequence. This aspect didn't cause confusion. I found the first two-thirds of the book to be mostly uninteresting personal reflections that you might expect a lonely older person to inflict on a listener who felt it rude to avoid. The opening two thirds included too few broader insights into life and I could only see myself being interested if the narrator had been my own ancestor. Another drawback: the book makes dozens (it felt like hundreds) of direct and indirect references to the narrator’s expected demise in the near term– far, far more repetition than necessary on this point. Fortunately, the final third of the book manages to make more general observations on life that were sometimes interesting and worthwhile. Readers who don't care for regular discourses into aspects of Christianity may find the book less palatable than readers who welcome the topic.
Plot/Premise: Gilead is largely plotless. This book takes the form of a letter from the narrator to his young son about his life and his observations on things around him. The letter is written in a non-chronological way. The present is small-town Iowa in 1956 but his reflections span a century back to the U.S. Civil War which his own grandfather participated in. The last third of the story often veers away from the narrator's own life and his messages to his son and spends some time focusing on Jack Boughton’s (the narrator's 43-year-old godson) and his observations of Jack from boyhood through to present.
Analysis: Major literary reviewers and the Pulitzer committee found the prose to be measured and thoughtful and they appreciated its philosophical musings. I didn't mind the jumping around in timeline back-and-forth from present to the time of the narrator's grandfather, the time of his father and the various stages of the narrator's life that occur with little discernible sequence. This aspect didn't cause confusion. I found the first two-thirds of the book to be mostly uninteresting personal reflections that you might expect a lonely older person to inflict on a listener who felt it rude to avoid. The opening two thirds included too few broader insights into life and I could only see myself being interested if the narrator had been my own ancestor. Another drawback: the book makes dozens (it felt like hundreds) of direct and indirect references to the narrator’s expected demise in the near term– far, far more repetition than necessary on this point. Fortunately, the final third of the book manages to make more general observations on life that were sometimes interesting and worthwhile. Readers who don't care for regular discourses into aspects of Christianity may find the book less palatable than readers who welcome the topic.
High 5.5
Beautiful prose. The epistolary reflections of an aged preacher concerned he’ll die before he can bestow all his fatherly and ministerial wisdom upon his young son. He reflects on his life, thoughts, grievances, lessons.. A life that just happens to him. He is frustratingly passive in all things, in contrast to everyone else.
Again, it is beautiful meditation.
But it’s not for me. I don’t resonate with the deeply rooted Calvinist Puritanism and Old Testament teachings. And it’s not something I shy away from in a character necessarily. But I want the book to think critically through that character about this religious influence on our country - from the early days to the alt-right co-opting it for “The Dark Enlightenment” or neo-reactionary movement. The author’s sincere beliefs clouds my ability to enjoy the text.
Minister John Ames is 77, and he knows he is dying. In this rapturously written novel, Ames leaves his seven-year-old son the legacy of a diary, with his thoughts, philosophy, reminiscences, and hopes and dreams for the young wife and son he leaves behind. Having lost a wife and child in his early years, Ames spent decades serving his congregation in faithfulness and loneliness. Unexpectedly, in his late 60s, a young woman enters his congregation and his life, giving him another chance at love and fatherhood.
Gilead, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, is a book to read slowly, savoring both the quiet wisdom infused throughout its pages, as well as its meditations on the relationships between fathers and sons, as well as on faith. Ames writes about his relationship with his own father; his father's relationship with his father, about his hopes for the future of his own son, who will grow up without him. He also writes about the father-son relationship between his closest friend, minister Boughton, and Boughton's prodigal, mysterious and troubled son, Jack. Why has young Boughton come back to town, Ames wonders? Does Jack have designs on Minister Ames' much younger wife? And can Ames' offer solace to Jack, estranged from his own father, and who wonders if he is condemned to perdition for his apostasy?
This remarkable book is one worth reading more than once, to savor not only the graceful and poignant writing but also for the wisdom and humanity of protagonists's voice. Toward the end of the story, Ames writes to his son:
"As I have told you, I myself was the good son, so to speak, the one who never left his father's house -- even when his father did, a fact which surely puts my credentials beyond all challenge. I am one of those righteous for whom the rejoicing in heaven will be comparatively restrained. And that's all right. There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal. So how could it subordinate itself to cause or consequence?
"It is worth living long enough to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire. Another reason why you must be careful of your health."
It is rare for me to give any book 5 stars. This one well deserves it.
Gilead, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, is a book to read slowly, savoring both the quiet wisdom infused throughout its pages, as well as its meditations on the relationships between fathers and sons, as well as on faith. Ames writes about his relationship with his own father; his father's relationship with his father, about his hopes for the future of his own son, who will grow up without him. He also writes about the father-son relationship between his closest friend, minister Boughton, and Boughton's prodigal, mysterious and troubled son, Jack. Why has young Boughton come back to town, Ames wonders? Does Jack have designs on Minister Ames' much younger wife? And can Ames' offer solace to Jack, estranged from his own father, and who wonders if he is condemned to perdition for his apostasy?
This remarkable book is one worth reading more than once, to savor not only the graceful and poignant writing but also for the wisdom and humanity of protagonists's voice. Toward the end of the story, Ames writes to his son:
"As I have told you, I myself was the good son, so to speak, the one who never left his father's house -- even when his father did, a fact which surely puts my credentials beyond all challenge. I am one of those righteous for whom the rejoicing in heaven will be comparatively restrained. And that's all right. There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal. So how could it subordinate itself to cause or consequence?
"It is worth living long enough to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire. Another reason why you must be careful of your health."
It is rare for me to give any book 5 stars. This one well deserves it.
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