Home
by Marilynne Robinson
Summary
Glory Boughton, thirty eight, her engagement collapsed and her teaching career with it, has come home to Gilead, Iowa, to keep house for her dying father, the Reverend Robert Boughton. Then Jack arrives. The most loved and least good of the eight Boughton children, the family's thief, drunk and vanisher, has been gone twenty years, missing even his mother's funeral, and his letter announcing a visit sets the whole novel trembling.
What follows is three people in a house, and almost nothing else, and it is enough. Jack, sober, courteous and braced for judgement, tries to learn the etiquette of being home; Glory, who barely knows this brother, cooks and gardens and negotiates the terrible tact of not asking; and their father, failing by the week, loves Jack with a desperation that keeps curdling into the reproach he has sworn not to make. Jack's secret, gradually shared with Glory, is that he has a wife in all but law, Della, a Black schoolteacher in Memphis, and a son, and that the Iowa his father praises as decent will not let them live in it, a fact the old man cannot see even when Jack, in the book's hardest scene, asks him about the television news from Montgomery.
The novel runs concurrently with Gilead, showing the same summer from inside the other house, and stands entirely alone.
Around three hundred and twenty pages, slow, plain and shattering.
Best for readers who want the parable of the prodigal son taken seriously as a problem: what the return actually costs, and who pays it.
Historical Context & Significance
Home won the Orange Prize in 2009 and had already taken the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a National Book Award finalist spot. It is the second panel of what became the Gilead quartet: Gilead, the Pulitzer winning novel of 2004, tells the same Iowa summer through the dying Reverend Ames, and Lila and Jack later gave their title characters their own books. Robinson writes the same few souls from successive angles the way painters repaint a motif, and Home is the quartet's most purely novelistic panel, the one that lives in dialogue and drama rather than in a single remembering voice.
Marilynne Robinson's standing is its own phenomenon: five novels across four decades, beginning with Housekeeping in 1980, essays on Calvin and the American mind between them, and a readership that included a sitting president who interviewed her. Jack's story pointedly connects her theological subjects to the racial history of the Midwest, and the quartet's later books follow that thread all the way down.