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Fiction: Gilead by Marilynn Robinson |
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Theology: Douglas Farrow's Ascension and Ecclesia |
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Poetry: Thomas Howard's Dove Ascending on T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets |
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Fiction: Marilynne Robinson's Gilead
Gilead: A Novel
by Marilynne Robinson
Picador, Reprint Edition, 2006
(256 pages,
$14.00, paperback)
reviewed by Elizabeth Hopkins Mickle
 I am often suspicious of prize-winning novels. But since two respected friends recommended Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, I decided to overlook the Pulitzer stamp and give it a try; I am truly glad I did. Gilead is simply and undeniably good; indeed it is one of the most beautiful and truly wonderful books I have read.
Robinson’s novel is comprised of memories and observations penned by the Reverend John Ames to his young son, the unexpected child of his old age, as Ames, his heart failing,
anticipates his death. Throughout Ames’s stories, from boyhood memories of searching with his father for the grave of his abolitionist grandfather and playing catch with his elder brother to reminiscences of baptizing his wife-to-be and sipping honeysuckle with his son as an old man, there runs a sense of wonder, a feeling that every moment should be cherished, the sad or difficult times right alongside the bright and easy. Robinson’s prose perfectly
captures the simple graces of everyday life, and Ames’s thankfulness and awe at the abundance of life are catching. Reflecting on a memory of a young man splashing his beloved with water from a rain-soaked tree limb, Ames muses:
In writing this, I notice the care it costs me not to use certain words more than I ought to. I am thinking about the word “just.” I almost wish I could have written that the sun just shone and the tree just glistened, and the water just poured out of it and the girl just laughed...People talk that way when they want to call attention to a thing existing in excess of itself, so to speak, a sort of purity or lavishness, at any rate something ordinary in kind but exceptional in degree….There is something real signified by that word “just” that proper language won’t acknowledge….I regret that I must deprive myself of it. It takes half the point out of telling the story.
Of course, now he has written those “justs,” and thus Robinson calls our attention to the glorious extravagance of the everyday. In fact, that deeper reality “that proper language won’t
acknowledge,” that sense of the “purity or lavishness” of ordinary things is, I think, at least half the point of Robinson’s novel.
The story of the man splashing the woman also occasions the introduction of a related theme, that of the sacredness of the common, the keen awareness that creation is good and serves as a key means of God’s revelation and grace:
I don’t know why I thought of that just now, except perhaps because it is so easy
to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash.
A summer moon provides further inspiration:
The moon looks wonderful in this warm evening light, just as a candle flame looks beautiful in the light of morning. Light within light. It seems like a metaphor for something. So much does....I’ll try to remember to use this. I believe I see a place for it in my thoughts on Hagar and Ishmael. Their time in the wilderness seems like a specific moment of divine Providence within the whole providential regime of Creation.
Each aspect of God’s creation serves not only as a blessing, like the water, but also as a metaphor, like the moon, to reveal to us the character of the Creator. Marilynne Robinson has given us a rare gift. Gilead renewed my sense of longing, stirred in me the pangs of joy, and made me alive again to the beauties of creation. We can learn much about how to live as Christians from the Reverend John Ames’s humility and from his
advice that, “This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.”
~ Beth Mickle
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