Home

a novel by
Marilynne Robinson
rel: 2008

Farrar, Straus and Giroux publishers

Home

An almost unutterably and grievously sad tale of longing, heartbreak, and their attendant truth.  This is the sequel to Gilead, Robinson's novel of a small town by that name, and 2 ministers who polarize yet orbit one another, much like the necessary bond of an Oxygen molecule, sharing an equal number of electrons.  But Home is another step, the polar perspective to Gilead.

Home winds us not through history or the townspeople, except for those necessary to the central tale, and not through a miasma of family ties either, like old scrapbooks that are simply interesting to the family members, and neither does it give way to narrative by way of events that keep us in suspense by their interweaving, as some fiction does.  It does have history, people, family, and a narrative that is definitely present, and leaning towards mystery, yet without any of those structures being the main support beam.  Instead, it takes us through the intricate, interwoven, and sometimes broken tapestry of the relationships that are born in a home, hence the title.  The other goal that this work so masterfully achieves is the unraveling of the mystery of faith in the individual, the nature of it, the impossibility of it in the face of our condition, and the inevitability of it only because of grace, and our ultimate submission to it.

Jack Boughton, the scion of the first book, the truly prodigal son of Reverend Boughton, comes Home, and this is the story from inside his house, a reversal of the perspective of Reverend Ames in the novel Gilead. For Jack to return, it has required a great deal of time away, and effort of will, battling the most supreme enemy of them all, destitution.  Purposes and motives are revealed, peeled back, one paragraph at a time, at times seeming to plod, and bringing us to a place of repetitiveness it would seem, but only for a moment, and then we realize that we're not reading the same thing again, with the same people, but it's delightfully different, deeper, sometimes darker, yes, but more intriguing than what we were expecting, more exacting, more closer to….home.

That's the scary thing really.  This painstakingly careful work of literary genius is surgical in its insistence that we face the human, ourselves, and although few of us might actually be in the exact relationships that these 3 people find themselves, that is only a stage and a backdrop to the play that we face when we put the book down for awhile and allow the haunting of the work to echo in our own reality.  I guarantee you that you will at some moment in the reading of this novel find a relational resemblance to something in your own life that bears bringing out from its possibly closeted inner sanctum for examination.  I also guarantee that because of the grace of the work that you will find a solace in it that will make it worth the effort.

Read this novel after Gilead.  If you have not read Gilead, or my review of Gilead, the Pulitzer Winner, please feel free to find it here: Gilead Review