Gilead
Certain novels are slow and contemplative; they paint a portrait of a life or a time using carefully selected shades and hues to capture a mood. There may not be much action beyond that of memory, but it is enough. More than enough even. Marilynne Robinson’s winner of the Pulitzer and National Book Critics Circle Award, Gilead (2004), is one such novel. Contemplative, slow-burn writing like hers gets at the big questions of life with a hefty serving of earnest feeling sprinkled throughout. Written in first-person, Gilead is one man’s reflection upon his life, his family, and the meaning of human goodness.
The year is 1956 when aging Revered John Ames’s declining health forces him to face his own mortality. He responds by penning the letter to his young son which becomes the novel Gilead. As his health deteriorates John Ames thinks back on his life full of both joy and sorrow, his father (a preacher in Iowa), and his grandfather (also a minister whose abolitionist beliefs and a divine vision called him to travel from his native Maine to join John Brown in Kansas and later act as a minister to the Union Army during the Civil War). Memories blend with spiritual conversation as Ames attempts to capture in epistle the type of man he is so that his son, only seven at the time, might have some account of the old man of a father he lost in childhood. All this amounts to a beautiful, touching address from a loving father after a long life of service and spiritual thought. It becomes something akin, at least in part, to Polonius’s advice to Laertes in Hamlet, full of both spiritual guidance and proverbial wisdom, but also (unlike Polonius’s words) populated by a fascinating cast of characters and rich with memory. Ames succeeds, I think, in his attempt to capture in epistolary form his very essence, and in the process of writing it gifts both himself and his son with a moving legacy.
The novel’s title comes from the fictional Iowa town in which Ames lives. By naming her novel for the town, a physical place on a map, Robinson roots what often becomes the metaphysical, spiritual thought wanderings of an aged man in the physical. In fact, Gilead is constantly exposing that tension between the world of the spirit and the world of man. As he sorts through the lessons he has learned from his own life, those of his forefathers, and those of his neighbors, the career preacher in Ames falls into name-dropping and reference-making that might only be truly meaningful to other lifelong spiritual students. While Gilead is ripe with lessons for the spirit, and provides ample opportunity for its reader to fall down many a referenced rabbit hole in research, I allowed these many references to wash over me and accepted them for what they were: this man’s attempt to communicate and grapple with a lifetime’s work of spiritual wisdom. Even if his audience fails to recognize his references, we see the wisdom he means to share, the careful contemplation of a lifetime, and it is communicated in such approachably, personal terms. Gilead is full of that; it brims with tone and word choice that is at once erudite and personal, its gaze is at once on the divine and on that which makes each of us human.
Needless to say, Gilead is a book I highly recommend, especially for those moments when a slow-moving, contemplative read is just what’s needed. After falling in love with the all too human characters that inhabit Ames’s story, know that there are three more novels that comprise what’s known as the Gilead quartet: Gilead (2004), Home (2008), Lila (2014), and Jack (2020). As I read the final pages of Gilead, I found comfort knowing that I would return to Gilead, Iowa and its everyman characters at some point in the future in Robinson’s three other novels.
Bibliography:
Robinson, Marilynne. Gilead. Picador: 2004.
A Few Great Passages:
“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).
“A little too much anger, too often or at the wrong time, can destroy more than you would ever imagine” (6).
“Our dream of life will end as dreams do end, abruptly and completely, when the sun rises, when the light comes. And we will think. All that fear and all that grief were about nothing. But that cannot be true. I can’t believe we will forget our sorrows altogether. That would mean forgetting that we had lived, humanly speaking. Sorrow seems to me to be a great part of the substance of human life. For example, at this very moment I feel a kind of loving grief for you as you read this, because I do not know you, and because you have grown up fatherless, you poor child” (104).
“In the matter of belief, I have always found that defenses have the same irrelevance about them as the criticisms they are meant to answer. I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it, in fact, because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things. We participate in Being without remainder. No breath, no though, no wart or whisker, is not as sunk in Being as it could be. And yet, no one can say what Being is” (178).
“Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable—which , I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live” (197).
“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” (238).
