Gilead: A Novel

Gilead: a Novel by Marilynne Robinson

Jack said, “It is an enviable thing, to be able to receive your identity from your father.” (p.168)

I finally finished Gilead: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson –  a  narrative or journal by a very elderly preacher who is writing to his son.  The man, John Amos, believes he will die soon leaving his young wife and his seven year old son.  The book covers John’s family history, his problematic relationship with his godson (also names John Amos), and various thoughts on different spiritual and religious themes.

I loved the way the author crafts words together.  Her writing shines – in fact, it is hard to separate out a quote because the writing is so entwined.

In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence.  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, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity.  But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us. (p. 197)

As you read, you get glimpses of these pictures the author is painting and it helps you move through the ramblings of this old man.  However, the first word that comes to my mind when I finished the book is ponderous.  There was a sense of heaviness despite the sometimes evocative language.  It wasn’t the themes.  I was intrigued by what Robinson had to say about abandonment, especially in relation to fathers and sons.  I liked what she had to say about finding your place in the world, by role (a preacher, a young wife to an elderly man, a son), by physical location, and by your spiritual and religious beliefs.  So if it wasn’t the language or the subject, why the sense of heaviness?  I don’t know.  I felt as if all the shinning strands she was weaving from were cast into the water  and sank.

Perhaps I just read this at the wrong time.  So I am putting it on my reread list.  Rather, on my  listen to list.  I think that, like many sermons, this book would be best listened to.  Then I may be able to better appreciate the author’s cadence and I will be swept up into the narrative.

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