Robinson writes with the gleaming, polished writing revealed in Housekeeping. In Gilead, the language is even more graceful and spare, recalling many of our nation’s most spiritual writers, from Herman Melville to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau (to whom Robinson claims she owes great literary debts). If John Ames is initially a little baffling, earnest but too introspective for some tastes, he soon draws readers into his world of storytelling, questioning, and meditation. In all realms, from recounting his journey to find his grandfather’s abandoned grave to his more philosophical probing of faith, he elevates the mundane into visionary life lessons. Other characters, including Ames’s fire-and-brimstone grandfather, are equally compelling. On the downside, Ames’s philosophizing can cross over into sermonizing. And the drama unfolds slowly—things do happen, but with a gentle suspense. "There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient," writes Ames. And there are just as many reasons to read this novel.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Marilynne Robinson draws on all of these associations in her new novel, which -- let's say this right now -- is so serenely beautiful, and written in a prose so gravely measured and thoughtful, that one feels touched with grace just to read it. Gilead possesses the quiet ineluctable perfection of Flaubert's "A Simple Heart" as well as the moral and emotional complexity of Robert Frost's deepest poetry. There's nothing flashy in these pages, and yet one regularly pauses to reread sentences, sometimes for their beauty, sometimes for their truth: "Adulthood is a wonderful thing, and brief. You must be sure to enjoy it while it lasts."

Robinson's narrator is that rarity in fiction -- a thoroughly good man. As the Rev. John Ames approaches his 77th birthday (and an impending death from heart disease), he decides to record something of his family's history and his own inner life. The result, he trusts, may be of value to his young son, now only 7, as well as a testament of his love for the boy and the boy's mother, the unexpected blessing of his old age. After Ames lost his first wife in childbirth, he never remarried but instead devoted himself utterly to his parishioners. But one day a young woman, a stranger, entered his church and the 67-year-old minister fell in love with her, staunchly saying nothing because of the disparity between their ages. Then one day . . . but let Rev. Ames tell the story, as he does in this long letter to his son:

"I came near alarming myself with the thought of the loneliness stretching ahead of me, and the new bitterness of it, and how I hated the secretiveness and the renunciation that honor and decency required of me and that common sense enforced on me. But when I looked up, your mother was watching me, smiling a little, and she touched my hand and she said, 'You'll be just fine.' . . .

"She began to come to the house when some of the other women did, to take the curtains away to wash, to defrost the icebox. And then she started coming by herself to tend the gardens. She made them very fine and prosperous. And one evening when I saw her there, out by the wonderful roses, I said, 'How can I repay you for all this?'

"And she said, 'You ought to marry me.' And I did."

Elsewhere he tells us that he "was so startled when she said that to me that for a minute I couldn't find any words to reply. So she walked away, and I had to follow her along the street. I still didn't have the courage to touch her sleeve, but I said, 'You're right, I will.' And she said, 'Then I'll see you tomorrow,' and kept walking. That was the most thrilling thing that ever happened to me in my life."

The marriage proves utterly happy: One thinks of Ruth and Boaz. For Ames "Love is holy because it is like grace -- the worthiness of its object is never really what matters."

As one would expect of a preacher, John Ames has always written with what he calls "the deepest hope and conviction. Sifting my thoughts and choosing my words. Trying to say what was true." His prose is rich with Biblical simplicity and power (note all those "ands"). As a man, he loves reading and study, but even more the sheer joy of existence. "This is an interesting planet," he says at one point, "it deserves all the attention you can give it." Ames doesn't miss much, though once he finds himself "trying to remember what birds did before there were telephone wires." Joyfully, repeatedly, this dying man celebrates the simple wonder of being alive:

"I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. 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. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don't imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely."

"To play catch of an evening, to smell the river, to hear the train pass" -- such is the quiet tenor of life in this small Iowa town. "It's just a cluster of houses strung along a few roads, and a little row of brick buildings with stores in them, and a grain elevator and a water tower with Gilead written on its side, and the post office and the schools and the playing fields and the old train station, which is pretty well gone to weeds now." If this sounds idyllic, Ames does mention darker memories -- a fire set at the Negro church, the plight of an ignorant unwed mother: "She and her family lived in an isolated house with a lot of mean dogs under the porch."

Still, an old man can't help but think of the past. More and more, Ames recalls the lives of his father and grandfather, both ministers of the Lord. Before the Civil War, Gilead had become a haven for John Brown and his supporters, it being located just across the border from bloody Kansas. Indeed, Ames's grandfather rode with Brown and once preached to his flock in a red-stained shirt with a pistol tucked in his belt. "It was the most natural thing in the world," notes the descendant of this visionary patriarch, "that my grandfather's grave would look like a place where someone had tried to smother a fire."

Fathers and sons, sons and fathers -- this never-easy relationship soon grows into the novel's major leitmotif, recalling the parallel theme of mothers and daughters in Robinson's revered Housekeeping, her only other novel. Inevitably, the crusading firebrand's son becomes a staunch pacifist, then suffers unforeseen sorrows over his own offspring. As Ames concludes, "We live in the ruins of the lives of other generations."

Much of Gilead reads like a spiritual diary, the journal of a country pastor. Nearly everyone seems to be unrealistically good and selfless, even those who disagree about how the Lord wishes us to carry out his commands in this world. But then one day the prodigal son of Ames's best friend returns to Gilead. Decades before, young John Boughton brought disgrace on himself and his family, then disappeared. Now in his early forties, he has come back to visit his dying father. But what was his crime? And what has he been up to all these intervening years?

The enigmatic Boughton starts visiting Ames and his family, going so far as to play catch with the little boy and to make Mrs. Ames laugh and grow fond of him. They are, after all, roughly the same age, and Ames gradually suspects some "kind of understanding between them." Yet even as he agonizes whether to reveal the evil of Boughton's past, the old minister finds himself preaching that, at least sometimes, we may entertain angels unawares.

The time span of Gilead is roughly a hundred years -- from the 1850s to 1956, when Ames sets down his story. Implicitly, it looks far into the future -- Ames imagines his little boy as an old man -- and in spirit back to Biblical times. Eventually one realizes that beyond a portrait of the human condition -- prey to isolation and loneliness, ever needful of faith and love -- Robinson has subtly introduced that great heartbreaking theme of American history, the often divisive, unfulfilled quest for social and racial justice.

But I've said enough about this immensely moving novel. It may not be quite as strange or lyrical as Housekeeping -- what could be? -- but it is an equal triumph of tone and imagination, another spiritual journey no serious reader will want to miss. Among recent novelists, Marilynne Robinson's only equal as an artist is the late Penelope Fitzgerald. And like the author of The Blue Flower, Robinson somehow manages to point up her moral wisdom and common sense with a dry, easily missed humor. As John Ames remarks, when thinking about the forgiveness of enemies, "It is worth living long enough to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire. Another reason why you must be careful of your health."

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Gilead

Audio Renaissance

Chapter One

It seems ridiculous to suppose the dead miss anything. If you're a grown man when you read this-it is my intention for this letter that you will read it then-I'll have been gone a long time. I'll know most of what there is to know about being dead, but I'll probably keep it to myself. That seems to be the way of things.

I don't know how many times people have asked me what death is like, sometimes when they were only an hour or two from finding out for themselves. Even when I was a very young man, people as old as I am now would ask me, hold on to my hands and look into my eyes with their old milky eyes, as if they knew I knew and they were going to make me tell them. I used to say it was like going home. We have no home in this world, I used to say, and then I'd walk back up the road to this old place and make myself a pot of coffee and a friend-egg sandwich and listen to the radio, when I got one, in the dark as often as not. Do you remember this house? I think you must, a little. I grew up in parsonages. I've lived in this one most of my life, and I've visited in a good many others, because my father's friends and most of our relatives also lived in parsonages. And when I thought about it in those days, which wasn't too often, I thought this was the worst of them all, the draftiest and the dreariest. Well, that was my state of mind at the time. It's a perfectly good old house, but I was all alone in it then. And that made it seem strange to me. I didn't feel very much at home in the world, that was a face. Now I do.

And now they say my heart is failing. The doctor used the term "angina pectoris," which has a theological sound, like misericordia. Well, you expect these things at my age. My father died an old man, but his sisters didn't live very long, really. So I can only be grateful. I do regret that I have almost nothing to leave you and your mother. A few old books no one else would want. I never made any money to speak of, and I never paid any attention to the money I had. It was the furthest thing from my mind that I'd be leaving a wife and child, believe me. I'd have been a better father if I'd known. I'd have set something by for you.

That is the main thing I want to tell you, that I regret very deeply the hard times I know you and your mother must have gone through, with no real help from me at all, except my prayers, and I pray all the time. I did while I lived, and I do now, too, if that is how things are in the next life.

I can hear you talking with your mother, you asking, she answering. It's not the words I hear, just the sounds of your voices. You don't like to go to sleep, and every night she has to sort of talk you into it all over again. I never hear her sing except at night, from the next room, when she's coaxing you to sleep. And then I can't make out what song it is she's singing. Her voice is very low. It sounds beautiful to me, but she laughs when I say that.

I really can't tell what's beautiful anymore. I passed two young fellows on the street the other day. I know who they are, they work at the garage. They're not churchgoing, either one of them, just decent rascally young fellows who have to be joking all the time, and there they were, propped against the garage wall in the sunshine, lighting up their cigarettes. They're always so black with grease and so strong with gasoline I don't know why they don't catch fire themselves. They were passing remarks back and forth the way they do and laughing that wicked way they have. And it seemed beautiful to me. It is an amazing thing to watch people laugh, the way it sort of takes them over. Sometimes they really do struggle with it. I see that in church often enough. So I wonder what it is and where it comes from, and I wonder what it expends out of your system, so that you have to do it till you're done, like crying in a way, I suppose, except that laughter is much more easily spent.

When hey saw me coming, of course the joking stopped, but I could see they were still laughing to themselves, thinking what the old preacher almost heard the say.

I felt like telling them, I appreciate a joke as much as anybody. There have been many occasions in my life when I have wanted to say that. But it's not a thing people are willing to accept. They want you to be a little bit apart. I felt like saying, I'm a dying man, and I won't have so many more occasions to laugh, in this world at least. But that would just make them serious and polite, I suppose. I'm keeping my condition a secret as long as I can. For a dying man I feel pretty good, and that is a blessing. Of course your mother knows about it. She said if I feel good, maybe the doctor is wrong. But at my age there's a limit to how wrong he can be.

That's the strangest thing about this life, about being in the ministry. And then sometimes those very same people come into your study and tell you the most remarkable things. There's a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that. A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you wouldn't really expect a find it, either.

Continues...
Excerpted from Gileadby Marilynne Robinson Copyright © 2005 by Marilynne Robinson. Excerpted by permission.
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