These books are off the beaten path for me. My go-to authors have generally been contemporaries within my life, or perhaps a few years older than me, and their publications have occurred within my adult reading life. I have missed out on a few that are not widely publicized, though I have begun to (re)discover several of these in recent years. Willa Cather wrote a century ago, she was a revelation to me. Marilynne Robinson walked into my life straight from the sale paperback table in Barnes and Noble. I am not immune to these temptations. The irony is that I had picked up an older paperback copy of Gilead many years ago. I recall reading a few pages and putting it aside due to the perceived content and deliberate story pacing. And there it sat on bookshelves and inside of bedside cabinets for a decade or more.
“Housekeeping” was published in 1980. It tells the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up in a remote part of the Northwest, close by to the Canadian border. Their fictional home in the small town of Fingerbone is apparently based on Sandpoint in northern Idaho, which is Robinson’s hometown. From the writing, I pictured it as closed in on all sides by tall dark forests and adjacent to a deep, opaque, and foreboding lake, crossed by a towering railroad bridge. And perhaps it was at one time, though now bounded by a national Interstate highway and advertised as a year-round resort.
“Fingerbone was never an impressive town. It was Chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere… The mountains that walled the valley were too close, the one upon another. The rampages of glaciers in their eons of slow violence had left the landscape in great disorder….”
‘My name is Ruth. I grew up with my younger sister, Lucille, under the care of my grandmother, Mrs. Sylvia Foster, and when she died, of her sisters-in-law, Misses Lily and Nona Foster, and when they fled, of her daughter, Mrs. Sylvia Foster.”
The circumstances of the passing of their grandparents and abandonment by their mother Helen (who subsequently drove her car off a cliff) left them left them stranded under the care of these transient and unstable relatives. Their great aunts found care of these young sisters to be too difficult and they retreated to Washington State, after summoning her proper aunt Sylvia. Sylvia is portrayed as a transient with odd notions of proper behavior, a free spirit who does not try to bring order or structure to the home.
“Sylvia wasn’t old.” “She wasn’t young.” “An itinerant.” “A migrant worker.” ”A drifter.” “Those two little girls.” “How could their mother have left them like that.” “No note was ever found.” “It couldn’t have been an accident.” “It wasn’t”. “They seem to be nice children.” “Very Quiet.” “Not as pretty as Helen was.” “They’re not unattractive.” “And they’ll have to get along on their own.”
These passages describe them perfectly:
“Lucille peered at me. When she made a decision, or a choice, I had little to say. She knew my side of things as well as I ever did. She would have considered already the fact that I had never made a friend in my life. Until recently neither had she. We really never had any use for friends or conventional amusements. We had spent our lives watching and listening with the constant sharp attention of children lost in the dark. It seemed that we were bewilderingly lost in a landscape that, with any light at all, would be wholly familiar. What to make of sounds and shapes, and where to put our feet. So little fell upon our senses, and all of that was suspect.”
“Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them. You simply say, “Here are the perimeters of our attention. If you prowl around under the windows till the crickets go silent, we will pull the shades. If you wish us to suffer your envious curiosity, you must permit us not to notice it.” Anyone with one solid human bond is that smug, and it is the smugness as much as the comfort and safety that lonely people covet and admire.” “…Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.”
“Their lives spun off the tilting world like thread off a spindle, breakfast time, suppertime, lilac time, apple time…” “When we did not move or speak, there was no proof that we were there at all.”
The two young girls experiment with truancy, and though originally close, they separate in interests and aspirations; eventually Lucille moves out of the house to the care of Miss Royce, a home economics teacher from their school. Ruth stays behind with Sylvie through several local adventures and eventual escape, just the two of them truly alone in the world; perhaps where they were meant to be all along.
The pace is of the writing is slow and deliberate, the characters and events are descriptive, as if occurring in the present. Descriptions of locations clear and precise. Dialog is direct. Great writing holds you close to the people and plots and events. The measure of a good story is whether you can truly picture the characters as individuals. Like viewing their lives through a window into their homes and thoughts and actions. This book meets the mark.
Additional short excerpts / quotes exhibit the breadth and clarity of her writing style:
“A narrow pond would form in the orchard, water clear as air covering grass and black leaves and fallen branches, all around it black leaves and drenched grass and fallen branches, and on it, slight as an image in an eye, sky, clouds, trees, our hovering faces and our cold hands.”
“You never know when you might be seeing someone for the last time.”
“Every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting long.”
“Every sorrow suggests a thousand songs, and every song recalls a thousand sorrows, and so they are infinite in number, and all the same.”
The story of this remote town and the carefully described characters stayed with me, a place and a time far removed, though the writing speaks in the present tense. If you appreciate this type of spare yet vivid writing style, consider giving it a read
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After finishing this book, I decided to re-approach her later novel Gilead, which won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2005. According to Robinson, the fictional town of Gilead (“Gilead” means ‘hill of testimony’ in the Bible – Genesis 31:21) is based on the real town of Tabor, Iowa, located in the southwest corner of the state and well known for its importance in the abolition movement.
The narrator of the story, Reverend John Ames, is an aging Congregational Minister. After the death of his first wife during the birth of his only child, he lived on his own for several years. Eventually he re-married, a younger woman (Lila) who had joined his church; she proposed to him, and they had one son. Lila is more than 30 years younger than John and is 41 during the time of the novel. It happened like this:
“I could have married again when I was still young. A congregation likes to have a married minister, and I was introduced to every niece and sister-in-law in a hundred miles. When your mother did come, when I hardly knew her, she gave me that look of hers-no twinkle in that eye-and said very softly and very seriously, “you ought to marry me”. That was the first time in my life I ever knew what it was like to love another human being. …she walked away, and I had to follow her along the street. I still didn’t have the courage to touch her sleeve, but I said, ‘You are right, I will.” And she said, “Then I’ll see you tomorrow, and kept on walking. That was the most thrilling thing that happened to me in my life.” “…How soft her voice is. That there should be such a voice in the whole world, and that I should be the one to hear it; it seemed to me then and it seems to me now an unfathomable grace.”
At the beginning of the book, Ames indicates he was born in 1880; he is seventy-six years old as the story opens. His health in decline, Ames expresses concern and regret that his seven-year-old son will have few memories of him as he grows into adulthood. He commits to composing a memoir of sorts, chronicling the history of his family dating back to the civil war, the ministries of his grandfather, and of his father as well. Of course, he as well entered the ministry, following in the steps of his forbearers.
He expresses regret for the outcomes of past relationships and events, mixed as well with vivid and poignant memories of his own youth. Reverand Robert Boughton, the paternal head of a large extended family, local Presbyterian minister, is introduced as Ames dear and lifelong friend. Boughton’s daughter Glory Boughten has returned to Gilead to comfort and care for her aging father. Her brother John Ames “Jack” Boughton, was named after the Reverand Ames; and he is a sort of godfather to the young man. Knowing John might not have children, Boughton intended that Jack and John would have a kind of father-son relationship (Jack even called John “Papa” growing up). Jack was away from Gilead for 20 years but returns during the story, looking for refuge and trying to make peace with his past and current circumstances. He had left in disgrace those many years ago, following his illicit relations and abandonment of a girl from a poverty-stricken family near his university. The daughter of this relationship died poor and uncared-for at the age of three, despite the Boughton family’s well-intended efforts to look after the child. Ames has never reconciled the conduct of young Jack Boughton and the lasting impact of these long past events. He expresses deep dislike mixed with wariness upon his return, even as Jack seeks his guidance and reconciliation.
Tension between the two persists throughout the story. Despite his anger at Jack’s transgressions, John also perceives that there is a deep loneliness and sadness in Jack. At one point Jack admits to John that he has never been able to believe in religion
At the end of the novel there is an additional revelation; Jack reveals to John that he is married to Della, who is Black, and that they have a son together. Their marriage was not legally recognized in Missouri, and they are harassed out of their home in St. Louis, and her own family utterly rejects him. He leaves Gilead in the end, after finally receiving a letter from Della (apparently) breaking off their relationship; he never reveals the whole truth about his life, and he does not know where he is headed next. Despite his ambivalence about Christianity, he willingly receives John’s blessing before he goes. As he leaves the rest of Robert Boughton’s large family are gathering to be with him in his final days.
Toward the end of his letter, John Ames turns inward to self-reflection: “I love the prairie. So often I have seen the dawn come and the light flood over the land and everything turn radiant at once, that word “good” so profoundly affirmed in my soul that I am amazed I should be allowed to witness such a thing. There may have been a more wonderful first moment “when the morning stars sang together and all of the sons of God shouted for joy”, but for all I know to the contrary, they still do sing and shout, and they certainly might well. Here on the prairie, there is nothing to distract attention from the evening and the morning, nothing on the horizon to abbreviate or to delay. Mountains would seem an impertinence from that point of view.” It seems rather Christlike to be unadorned as this place is, as little regarded.
He ends his letter with a prayer that the young man grows up to be “a brave man in a brave country, and to find a way to be useful.” A gentle denouement.
Like Housekeeping, the pace of the book is deliberate, the writing is precise, the plotlines are spare but clear in purpose. A few of my favorite passages follow:
“….as I was walking up to the church. There was a young couple strolling along half a block ahead of me. The sun had come up brilliantly after a heavy rain, and the trees were glistening and very wet. On some impulse, plain exuberance, I suppose, the fellow jumped up and caught hold of a branch, and a storm of luminous water came pouring down on the two of them, and they laughed and took off running, the girl sweeping water off her hair and dress as if she were a little bit disgusted, but she wasn’t. It was a beautiful thing to see, like something from a myth…This is an interesting planet. It deserves all of the attention you can give it.”
“Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday. It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain. You can feel the silent and invisible life.”
“Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was.”
“I’ve developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books.”
“I have always wondered what relationship this present reality bears to ultimate reality. A thousand ages in Thy sight Are like an evening gone…” “Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations…, 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 all together. That would mean forgetting that we lived, humanly speaking. Sorrow seems to be a great part of the substance of human life.“
There’s so much to be grateful for, words are poor things.”
Historical fiction is a window to another time, and these two stories reveal universal truths about human nature. In this season of my life, I begin to reflect more on the transitions of family, friends, and career; paths taken and people who have intersected my life, what was then and what is now. Those who touch me still. I do not carry nostalgia well; it is best to always look forward. Though the imprints of our eventful lives stay with us and the world we self-construct.
What books have you recently stumbled across that have enhanced your reading life, and perhaps your actual life?
A few footnotes: I learned that Gilead is part of a four-part series. Apart from John Ames the characters in Gilead are drawn with relatively broad and shallow brushstrokes. I may go back and read these in sequence, though a large stack of other books awaits in the meantime:
Home is a novel written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning American author Marilynne Robinson. Published in 2008, it is Robinson’s third novel, preceded by Housekeeping in 1980 and Gilead in 2004.- The novel chronicles the life of the Boughton family, specifically the father, Reverend Robert Boughton, and Glory and Jack, two of Robert’s adult children who return home to Gilead, Iowa. A companion to Gilead, Home is an independent novel that takes place concurrently and examines some of the same events from a different angle.
Lila is a novel written by Marilynne Robinson that was published in 2014. Her fourth novel, it is the third installment of the Gilead series, after Gilead and Home. The novel focuses on the courtship and marriage of Lila and John Ames, as well as the story of Lila’s transient past and her complex attachments. It won the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award.
Jack is a novel by Marilynne Robinson, published in September 2020. It is Robinson’s fifth novel and her fourth in the Gilead sequence, preceded by Gilead (2004), Home (2008), and Lila (2014). It focuses on John Ames “Jack” Boughton, the troubled son of Robert Boughton. He was named after Robert’s friend Reverend John Ames, the subject of Gilead (2004). It tells the story of the courtship of Della Miles and Jack Boughton, an interracial couple in post-World War II St. Louis, Missouri.
Marilynne Robinson – Wikipedia Marilynne Summers Robinson (born November 26, 1943) is an American novelist and essayist. Across her writing career, Robinson has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, National Humanities Medal in 2012, and the 2016 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. In 2016, Robinson was named in Time magazine’s list of 100 most influential people.[2] Robinson began teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1991[3] and retired in the spring of 2016.[4]
Robinson is best known for her novels Housekeeping (1980) and Gilead (2004). Her novels are noted for their thematic depiction of faith and rural life.[5] The subjects of her essays span numerous topics, including the relationship between religion and science, US history, nuclear pollution, John Calvin, and contemporary American politics.