This is by Marilynne Robinson. It was first published in 2004, and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction the following year. It's the first of a quartet of books set in the fictional town of Gilead, Iowa.

I arrived here via Ocean Vuong, who describes Gilead as "one of the epistolary masterpieces of the 21st century".

Several things here already:

-- The book does indeed take the form of a letter. It's written by an aging man whose heart condition means he probably doesn't have much longer to live. His name is John Ames, and he is a Congregationalist minister, as were his father and grandfather before him. He was born in 1880 in the state of Kansas, but he has lived in Gilead for 74 of his 76 years. So even I don't need a calculator to figure out it's now 1956. The letter, which is episodic, alternating between snippets of his past and musings on his present, is addressed to the son born from his second marriage (his first wife and first child died, leaving him alone for many decades). His second wife is much younger than he is, so his son, at not quite seven, could actually be his grandson in terms of age. But his desire is for the son to read the letter when he's an adult -- when the writer is long gone, in other words.

-- I'm not sure I'm a fan of epistolary novels... The form, to me, is a bit of a straitjacket, leaving the novel flatter than it perhaps could have been.

-- But this view puts me at odds with many who may well know better. Once again I'm not on the same page as Oprah ("Marilynne Robinson is one of our greatest living authors") -- a view with which author Phil Christman concurs: "I think she’s the greatest living English language writer" -- or Obama (he's a big fan of Robinson's, and John Ames is one of his favourite fictional characters). Author and writing teacher Nathan Bransford really rates her technique; Sam Jordison describes Gilead as "a wonderful, precious book" (although he does admit "it isn't an easy sell"); and David Anderson sees it as an "exquisite and wonderfully realized story... a passionate meditation".

-- The scenario certainly has an inbuilt pathos. The narrator knows that his remaining time may be short, and that focuses your mind for sure. Five Books recommends it in the "best books on ageing" category, because it deals very eloquently with regrets, physical deterioration, and anxieties about what will happen to your loved ones when you can no longer protect them. Robinson herself (born in 1943) is very robust on ageing. In 2018, she explained how getting older has only emphasized for her "how amazing it is to have been alive in the first place", and has changed her mindset on trivial inconveniences: Rather than complain about them, she reflects that there is only a finite number of times when these things can happen... As a youngster, she was given two pieces of advice: "The first was a quote from the 18th-century philosopher-theologian Jonathan Edwards...: 'Never permit a thought that you wouldn’t permit on your deathbed.'... The second was from an English teacher in high school: 'You will live with your mind for the rest of your life, so make it a good companion.'" I wish I'd known that last one in time to pass it on to my students...


Marilynne Robinson, 2018

-- The reflections that arise from the narrator's vulnerable position, and his acute awareness of his transience, were among the most moving elements of the book. Despite his unshakeable belief in a future life, he is alive to the present moment in a way that most of us often aren't; he's exquisitely sensible of the joys of physical life, however banal. Examples:

---- He watches his wife and son blowing bubbles together to amuse the cat (Soapy), who chases wildly after the bright little spheres: "Your mother is wearing her blue dress and you are wearing your red shirt and you were kneeling on the ground together with Soapy between and that effulgence of bubbles rising, and so much laughter. Ah, this life, this world..."
---- "Existence seems to me now the most remarkable thing that could ever be imagined. I'm about to put on imperishability... While you read this, I am imperishable, somehow more alive than I have ever been... [But] I want your dear perishable self to live long and to love this poor perishable world, which I somehow cannot imagine not missing bitterly... And I can't believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us."
---- "When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters. There are so many things you would never think to tell anyone. And I believe they may be the things that mean most to you."
---- "I wish I could give you the memory I have of your mother that day. I wish I could leave you certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am."
---- "There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient."
---- "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."

-- These "how to live" moments were beautiful. And John Ames has a lot of common sense to share. Examples:

---- "It seems to me some people just go around looking to get their faith unsettled."
---- After several bad nights' sleep: "I have decided the two choices open to me are (1) to torment myself or (2) to trust the Lord. There is no earthly solution to the problems that confront me. But I can add to my problems... by dwelling on them."
---- "Nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense."
---- "One lapse of judgment can quickly create a situation in which only foolish choices are possible."

-- I wasn't so fond of the theological excursions, though... I'm with Ali Smith here: "Ames is ... sententious and irritatingly given to homily. He can on the one hand make water sound miraculous and on the other make a reader as nervous and fidgety as a long morning in church." Tessa Hadley is not won over by Ames's "homiletic habit" either: "The problem with the novel is that the quantity of rumination is disproportionate to the embodiment."

*_*_*

That was a very long introduction... The rest of the post is about the themes I enjoyed the most (and there are a lot of spoilers, so beware).

THE NARRATOR

John Ames doesn't scruple to make us party to his struggles, even though he's embarrassed by them. He has difficulty, for example, seeing good in John Ames Boughton aka Jack (the son that his preacher friend Boughton named after him). Jack once fathered an illegitimate child whom he abandoned along with her uneducated mother (the little girl dies at the age of three). Ames knows he shouldn't judge, but he does; he knows he should forgive, but he doesn't; and he is full-on jealous, fearing that the charming but devious Jack, who is about the same age as the narrator's wife, and gets on easily with her and their son, will take his place after his imminent demise.

There's been a bit of discussion in the criticism about how "good" John Ames is... Hadley feels much of what he inadvertently reveals about himself is at odds with what he claims to represent: "There’s plenty in what Ames tells us, and in the way he tells it, to support readings of his character and motivations rather more rounded than the account he offers of himself... Perhaps he isn’t quite the blessing and blessed old man he thinks he is." Jordison also asks: "Is Ames really as good as he wants his readers to think he is?" The character, though, says Robinson, "presented himself to me as a good man". To me he comes across as very real. I don't find him complacent (he knows self-doubt and self-blame), and while he's not on fire for causes that we might wish him to be backing (anti-racism, for example) -- well, how many of us are as active for good as we should be? I do, on the other hand, find his unwavering faith a little unnerving. And when he says, "Whatever is coming, I'd be sorry to miss it," I shudder a little. I can think of lots of things I'd be glad to miss.



KNOWING OTHERS

Two very poignant and perceptive quotes, which need no commentary:

-- "You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension."

-- "In every important way we are such secrets from each other... 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. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness... But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us."

FATHERS AND SONS -- VIOLENCE

This is one of the novel's most powerful themes. Ames's grandfather was a vehement abolitionist, a prophet-like, vision-prone figure of abstinence and zealotry. But his dedication saw violence as a way to right wrongs. Ames's father, on the other hand, was a pacifist. The two were increasingly unable to see eye to eye. Grandfather eventually leaves to pursue an itinerant path. When the family learns of his death, Ames's father takes the 12-year-old version of our narrator to try to track down the grave. As they walk -- and it's a tough walk, through a kind of wilderness, fraught with dangers of various kinds -- his father tells him anecdotes that fill in his family history. They're passed on to us, but in hoppety-clickety, non-linear fashion, so that we have to slowly cobble the history together.

Gilead is based on the town of Tabor, Iowa.


Tabor's main street, c. 1910

And there's some interesting background to the real Tabor here:

"Religious visions were everywhere in the years preceding the Civil War. Boom towns out west here may have been hell holes for a time, but they were also peopled by starry-eyed believers who claimed their marching orders came from on high...

"Tabor has an epic past, created when fiery abolitionist Congregationalists set up camp here, just across the river from Nebraska. The Reverend John Todd House, in town, was a stop on the Underground Railroad in the 1850s, often a port of entry to runaway slaves who weren’t free until they could be protected from slave-holders and vigilante northerners looking to make a buck from substantial bounties. There was money to be made: slaves were property, after all. In the 1850s, slavery was under attack, and Rev. Todd was a soldier in God’s army... Both Iowa Congregationalists and Iowa Quakers thought the institution of slavery an abomination. What separated the two faith communities was a commitment to violence. The Quakers said no. Rev John Todd and his Congregationalists said yes and became a prototype for an abolitionist preacher in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead...

"At the request of none other than fiery John Brown, who stayed right there in Tabor, Pastor Todd stocked his house full of guns BECAUSE he simply could not abide the sin of slavery. Slaves, he and his friend John Brown claimed, had a more righteous reason for rebellion than did patriot colonists a century before."


The underground links

A lot of this surfaces in the novel. Commenting on his grandfather's eventual departure (which was a bit of a relief, as he gave to the poor anything that wasn't actually nailed down), Ames says: "He was just afire with old certainties... He thought we should all be living at a dead run... I believe we knew also that his eccentricities were thwarted passion, that he was full of anger, at us not least, and that the tremors of his old age were in some part the tremors of pent grief."

Granddad was involved in some violence at one point in the conflict. He may even have killed a man. Ames's father is appalled, and never really forgives him. So they part on bad terms. It's one of those unbridgeables: For Dad, Granddad is just too out there; for Granddad, Dad is lily-livered, his preaching too inoffensive to be worth anything. Granddad is bitterly disappointed that victory in the Civil War didn't achieve what he thought it would. Dad is still placing his hope in the ensuing peace. A vivid exchange closes this bit of the narrative, worth quoting in full:

"My grandfather said, 'And that's just what kills my heart, Reverend. That the Lord never came to you. That the seraphim never touched a coal to your lips -- '

"My father stood up from his chair. He said, 'I remember when you walked to the pulpit in that shot-up, bloody shirt with that pistol in your belt. And I had a thought as powerful and clear as any revelation. And it was, This has NOTHING to do with Jesus. Nothing. Nothing.'...

"And that was when a chasm truly opened. Not long afterward my grandfather was gone. He left a note lying on the kitchen table which said:

"No good has come, no evil is ended. That is your peace. Without vision the people perish. The Lord bless you and keep you.

"I still have that note. I saved it in my Bible."

Our narrator is a pacifist too -- to the extent that he regards the Spanish influenza epidemic, which ravaged first army units and then the civilian community, as a sign from God. In a sermon that he (wisely) doesn't preach, he wanted to say: "I said that their deaths were a sign and a warning to the rest of us that the desire for war would bring the consequences of war, because there is no ocean big enough to protect us from the Lord's judgment when we decide to hammer our plowshares into swords and our pruning hooks into spears, in contempt of the will and the grace of God." It wouldn't have been the time or the place (the congregation at that point consisted of just a few old women who disapproved of the war as much as he did). But I wish someone could preach that message to our current shower of leaders...


Rev John Todd's house

FATHERS AND SONS -- RACE

The novel is largely impartial about which version of Christianity should prevail. I'm more pacifist than interventionist, so that's the mast I would nail my colours to. But Robinson cleverly points out that the race issue has gone backwards in Gilead. To that extent, pacifism has failed.

As we saw in the account of Tabor above, Gilead (like its fictional counterpart) came into being to advance abolitionist interests. Once a stop on the Underground Railway (there are some amusing recollections of the tunneling), it's now pretty white. The small black population has left; their church was burnt down, allegedly by accident. Ames says: "I didn’t know the Negro pastor well myself, but he said his father knew my grandfather. He told me they were sorry to leave, because the town had once meant a great deal to them."

Now, this matters because we learn right at the end that Jack has a black wife, Della, and a child. It's an unofficial relationship, because of the legal situation where he lives. But he wants to set up house with her openly (correcting his earlier misdeeds), and wondered if Gilead would be the place he could do that, especially as Iowa never banned interracial marriage. This is a poignant moment. It's infinitely sad that Gilead, with all that history, doesn't qualify... Jack can't even bring himself to trust this information to his father, who's a minister, and Ames just can't see the town welcoming a biracial family. So Granddad's anger and bitter disappointment seem eminently justified. And it's ironic that Della's father is implacably opposed to any union with Jack, and the only thing that softens his attitude is the connection with Granddad Ames...

It's not 1956 for nothing: "[It's] two years after the landmark BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION school desegregation decision and just months before the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, which would launch the modern civil rights movement." It's also the year Mahalia Jackson met Martin Luther King Jr, and, to benefit that very boycott, so memorably sang There Is a Balm in Gilead...

So that is utterably sad. But the fact that Jack can tell Ames about his wife finally reconciles the two. The narrator gives him his blessing, and it's meant sincerely.

*_*_*

Two final things to note:

The first is that Ames writes indefatigably. He has thousands of pages of sermons in his attic... He reminds me of Philipose in The Covenant of Water, endlessly writing his life into his journals. He reminds me of ME, endlessly writing my thoughts into blog posts. He says: "It's humiliating to have written as much as Augustine, and then to have to find a way to dispose of it. There is not a word in any of those sermons I didn't mean when I wrote it. If I had the time, I could read my way through fifty years of my innermost life. What a terrible thought. If I don't burn them someone else will sometime, and that's another humiliation. This habit of writing is so deep in me..." At least digital outpourings will be easier to get rid of...

The second is the reference to The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, which also came up in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas... Now I have to read it...


The song derived from the novel

Such a long post means that even though I didn't entirely like the book, I found a lot to engage with. I would definitely tackle more of the quartet.