Gilead
by Marilynne Robinson
Summary
It is 1956 and the Reverend John Ames, seventy six years old and dying of a bad heart, is writing a letter to his seven year old son. The boy will not remember him. So Ames sets down everything he wants him to have: the town of Gilead, Iowa, his own father and grandfather, and what he has made of a long life spent preaching to a congregation that has been shrinking since the war.
The grandfather is the wildest thing in the book. He came to Kansas as an abolitionist, rode with John Brown, preached with a pistol in his belt and one eye lost to the fighting, and gave away everything in the house to anyone who asked. His son became a pacifist, and the two of them argued for the rest of their lives about whether God had wanted the war.
The present tense trouble is Jack Boughton, the wayward son of Ames's oldest friend, named for Ames himself, back in town after twenty years with something he needs to say. Ames cannot make himself be generous to him, and knows it, and is running out of time to fix it.
Ames married late and badly the first time, losing a wife and a daughter within a year, and then spent forty years alone before a young woman walked into his church on a Pentecost Sunday and eventually asked him to marry her. The boy is the result, and the letter keeps circling back to the astonishment of having a family at seventy.
There is almost no plot. It is a single unbroken voice, arriving in fragments of a paragraph or two, and the pleasure is entirely in the sentences and in watching a good man examine himself without flattery. It is slow on purpose and it will not reward reading at speed. Best for readers who want a book about attention and forgiveness, and who can sit still for one.
Historical Context & Significance
Gilead won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The book jacket quoted on the Pulitzer Prize site called it the long hoped for second novel by one of our finest writers, a hymn of praise and lamentation to the God haunted existence that Reverend Ames loves passionately and from which he will soon part.
The long hoped for is the point. Marilynne Robinson published Housekeeping in 1980, won the PEN Hemingway Award for it, and then published no fiction at all for twenty four years, teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and writing essays instead.
She has since returned to the same few weeks in Gilead three more times, in Home, Lila and Jack, each retelling the events from inside a different character, so the four books can be read in any order. Barack Obama named it a favourite and interviewed Robinson at length in Des Moines in 2015 for the New York Review of Books.