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Characters
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By
Margaret Black
Home
By
Marilynne Robinson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 325 pages, $25
‘Talk
to each other, for heaven’s sake!” you want to scream at the
smothered characters in Home, Marilynne Robinson’s
infuriating new novel, as they hesitantly tiptoe around the
walls surrounding all the feelings, desires, and experiences
that matter to them. You can get so annoyed with everyone
that you finally don’t care whether they arrive at any resolutions
or not. This is particularly frustrating because in Home,
Robinson has taken a second look at the people and stories
that made up her glorious and popular novel of three years
ago, Gilead.
Both novels take place over the summer of 1956, in the tiny
town of Gilead, Iowa. Gilead focuses on all the things
that the Reverend John Ames (in his 70s) wants to tell the
miraculous 7-year-old child of his very late second marriage,
and this ultimately includes his fear that Jack Boughton,
his namesake and the son of his best friend, the Rev. Robert
Boughton, will somehow bring harm to his beloved wife and
son. Home focuses on the charming, now very threadbare,
black sheep/prodigal son Jack, who returns after 20 years
apparently to make peace with his dying father. Jack’s youngest
sister, 38-year-old Glory, also has come home, shortly before
Jack arrives, her life a meaningless desert. While Gilead
is voiced with great modulation and insight by John Ames in
the first person, Home is told in the third person,
with the narrative largely reflecting the thoughts and feelings
of Glory. As in Gilead, the author embeds the characters’
concerns in the theology and language of Calvinist Christianity.
Neither book is a novel of plot; the pleasure of reading both
comes from the author’s nuanced characters and subtle changes
of relationship.
Jack, after a childhood of inexplicably perverse and isolating
bad behavior and a dissolute youth in which he fathered and
abandoned a child, now dead, has left home, gotten in enough
trouble to be sent to prison, and become an alcoholic. But
after prison, Glory gradually learns, Jack formed a long-term
relationship—a marriage in fact if not in name—and he appears
to be trying to reestablish connection with this woman.
Robert, who loves Jack best of all his many children, has
always forgiven him, but Jack is not particularly interested
in forgiveness. Nevertheless, it becomes clear to Glory that
he is trying to find some ground on which to be honest and
engaged with his father, and this includes trying to talk
about matters of ethics and of theology. Jack’s capacity to
be charming and appear utterly sincere—qualities he has used
ruthlessly to his own ends—makes it extraordinarily difficult
for anyone, including himself, to tell when he is, as a matter
of fact, saying what he really means.
Jack raises the issue of the black bus boycott in Montgomery,
but his father regards the black protests as provocation and
incitement to violence. The conversation stops dead. Toward
the end of the novel Jack asks his father at a dinner with
John Ames and his wife about predestination—does God truly
foreordain that some shall be saved but that many others are,
from birth, doomed to perdition? His father and John Ames
understand Jack’s apparent worry here and fudge the discussion,
but Ames’ young wife, who also understands and quite clearly
has a past of her own, declares that people can change, with
the implication that they can be saved. But no one speaks
directly about their personal experiences, personal needs,
or fears.
Glory thinks that Jack has an ulterior motive for coming back
to Gilead, and it involves the woman he keeps writing to.
By the end of Gilead, Ames knows why Jack returned
and understands why he is leaving again, but this is something
Jack’s father never learns in either book.
Jack is a fascinating character, and his dilemma and desires
are sympathetic. His alcoholism is treated brilliantly, and
subtly we are brought to see that it may represent the greatest
obstacle of all. But Home perpetually bogs down in
strangled reticence where Gilead is shot through with
light and humor despite its very serious content. Glory, whose
interactions with the world occur largely through food and
housework, reflects on the dumplings she’s making. She’s eaten
some terrible ones, and “it occurred to her to wonder if they
were ever good in the ordinary sense, if at best they were
not just familiar, inoffensive.” Home is the dumpling
of Robinson’s writing. She meticulously realizes the physical
scene, the intense dreariness of an overstuffed old house,
the process of digging out an old iris bed, of fixing an old
car. The author reestablishes the relationship between Glory
and Jack in a complex and believable way. But Home
has none of the light that illuminates Gilead, none
of the achingly felt love, none of the brilliant humor. In
Gilead Ames is capable of seeing himself as comic,
foolish, envious, jealous, and resentful, but the characters
in Home are simply earnestly doughy. They really deserve
better.
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