Review: Marilynne Robinson's "Gilead"

There is a balm in Gilead. Just not this one.

So when I started reading novels by living authors about ten years ago or so, one of the first ones I read was Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. I’m not sure how I came upon her work, though it was probably because Robinson is a Calvinist, and openly religious novelists with some acclaim from the literary establishment are rare. (She is apparently a “liberal” Calvinist, which might explain the oversight.) Someone in Catholic circles with literary interests must have put me on to it. Robinson taught at the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa, the most prestigious academic writing program in the United States, and is an acclaimed author, who has won the Pulitzer Prize, among other honors. She is a fine prose stylist, as all this would indicate. Gilead is truly well written; and also, I hated it with the power of ten thousand suns.

The novel concerns the Congregationalist minister John Ames, who lives in the small Iowa town of Gilead. Ames is approaching the end of his life, and in his sermons and letters reflects on his ministry, as well as his relationship with his much younger wife Lila and the son of his old age. The novel is written in epistolary form, and Ames tells the reader he is doing this for his young son, who will otherwise know nothing about him. His neighbor and friend, Robert Boughton, who is also a minister, lives next door with his daughter. The minister reflects on his life and the changes he has seen, particularly with regards to religion and tells the story of his abolitionist grandfather, who fought in the Civil War. Toward the end of the novel, the Midwestern quiet of the town is broken by the arrival of the neighbor’s son Jack—the black sheep of the family who left home, and married a black girl with whom he has a son. Ames is suspicious of Jack, but after Jack confides his family secret to him, Ames offers him his blessing before Jack departs Gilead.

The book is in many ways an elegy to a kind of milquetoast, post-WWII Mainline Protestantism that no longer exists, or if it does, has one foot in the grave. Ames is intellectual, conscientious and works hard to craft his sermons, but knows that Christianity as he has understood it is on the wane. This gives the book a wistful, almost resigned quality that makes his character seem passive to the point of somnolence. Of course he is dying physically, but that is not why I found the character and the book so arid and unappealing. A sense that his world is coming to an end pervades the novel and yet there is little sense of Ames wanting to do anything about it. He seemingly has no intention of fighting for what he believes or holds dear.

This makes the novel, at least to me, unbearably dull. Being a very traditional Catholic, you can imagine I don’t have much sympathy for Calvinism, or Protestantism of any sort, for that matter. And the old Mainline Protestantism never attracted me much, especially the 1950s incarnation of it portrayed in Gilead. So it was hard for me to feel much investment in the story’s main plotline, and combined with main character’s seeming acquiescence to that decline made it tough reading.

But there is a reason I put Gilead on the list: whatever her faults as a storyteller (more on that in a moment), Robinson is a super prose stylist. I wrote most of the summary of the novel from memory, even though I have not read the book in over ten years. (I had to look up character’s names, I admit.) I can remember vague impressions of the main character’s sermons, and the recounting of Ames’ trek across Kansas when he was a boy with his father to find his grandfather’s grave (probably the best scene in the whole novel) pretty well. Her prose has the same limpid quality I discerned in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels. She is legitimately a great writer, and my subjective preferences aside, I can easily see why some love her work.

Why did I dislike the novel so much, if that is the case? Mainly because I believe Robinson could have told a much more engaging story but chose not to. The most compelling part of the whole novel to me was at the very end, when Jack shows up in the pew beside Ames’ wife and son. Instantly, you could feel the tension: Ames feels he s being replaced by a younger, more sexually vigorous man sent alarm bells off in my head. Ames, who to that point had inspired in me little more than the desire to sleep, became exponentially more important to me as a reader. All of a sudden, I was deeply invested in Ames and how his story turned out. And then the novel ended.

If the story had begun with the pastor looking out into the congregation and seeing his wife and son sitting next to that man, I would have been invested much more as a reader in the whole story of his and his religion’s decline from the beginning, however it turned out. That sort of conflict—a conflict of generations, of one man seeking to perpetuate his legacy and another threatening to undo it—would have made Ames’ story much more dramatic and compelling to someone who does not share his religious or cultural beliefs. But I suspect Robinson didn’t want to do that, because her main focus was the elegy for the pastor’s world and faith, which too much drama might occlude. It would dilute the purity of the message, as it were, which is obviously more important to her. For some, the Word takes precedence over the Story I suppose.

At least for me, then, there is no balm in Gilead. Robinson has since published a follow up to Gilead entitled Jack, which views things from that character’s perspective. I have no plans to read it or anymore of Robinson’s work. But for those who share her worldview or at least not off put by it, you will encounter a fine crafter of prose, if not the greatest storyteller in the world.