Review: Gilead

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Marilynne Robinson launched herself from a respected one-novel writer into a Nobel Prize candidate on the strength of this book and its two sequels, Home and Lila. That may sound extreme, but I endorse it. This book is, on the one hand, a good man’s drama as he assesses the quality of his life. On the other, it’s an interrogation of a faith that helped shape America and now may be withering.

This book would be a masterpiece if it were only the story of John Ames as he composes a kind of ethical will for his seven-year-old son. Now 76 and diagnosed with heart trouble that will kill him in the coming months, Ames writes his life story for the son he will never know in adulthood. “There are many ways to live a good life,” he says near the beginning, and that’s only one part of the power of the narrative: he doubts his son will become a fourth-generation Congregationalist minister, but he’s not concerned about such “details.” Instead, he wants his son to have access to the spirituality that has driven his family for more than a century.

Ames talks of his grandfather, a fiery abolitionist who – throughout the 1840s and Civil War – stood as a defiant and brave figure. Claiming direct visions of a Christ who calls on him to hate the chains of slavery, the grandfather left Maine to settle in a Kansas that was a flashpoint for the expansion of slavery. A fervent supporter of John Brown, the grandfather may have once killed a man in support of the clearly good goal of ending slavery.

He talks as well of his father, a mild pacifist who – in the quieter years after the Civil War – reflected on the nature of violence in a way that’s unquestionably admirable but that seemed a rebuke to the grandfather.

Ames positions himself in the middle of those two extremes, refusing to condemn either his grandfather or father. In keeping with his deep theology, he sees the fundamental beauty of the world in all its facets. He is heir both to passion and patience. As he weighs his life, he has to determine whether he has allowed those two halves of his heritage to cancel each other out or strengthen one another.

He recounts as well his life in the small town of Gilead, in the Iowa to which his grandfather retreated for a time. The world may see a town growing superfluous in the urbanization of post-World War II American, but he sees it as a community reflective of the larger country. There are decent people making lives there and – as he always does – he sees the abiding beauty in that simple human truth.

He encounters one line of personal drama as well. Jack Boughton, the prodigal son of his best friend and his own godson, returns for a time, and Ames has difficulty forgiving him. Jack was an inconsiderate youth, fathering a child he abandoned and bringing heartbreak to his father at every turn. Jack has become a better, more thoughtful man – see Home for a fuller exploration of that – but he is still a troubled and haunted man.

It falls to Ames to try to see decency in someone he has long dismissed, to see promise in someone who will go on living even as he, Ames, readies for death.

If there’s an emotional climax here, it comes when Ames does indeed bless Jack “the extent of my powers.” On the one hand, it changes nothing; Jack is still abandoning his father and family in fear of his own weakness and humiliation. On the other, it changes everything: in the name of the great theological tradition undergirding the book, he finds the strength to name the beauty even of the least good people of the world he loves.

If that were all the novel concerned, as I say, it would still be a great book. At the same time, though, it serves as an allegory for the sense that the great Calvinist tradition that shaped America is at a cultural crossroads. Demographically, the movement has become dominated by right-wing, often intolerant scolds and – at times – charlatans. You have hucksters like Jim Bakker and prosperity-Gospel claimants like Joel O’Steen, and that’s even before you get to someone like Jerry Falwall, Jr., a man who – even if we look at him in the best of lights – has yoked his theology to the divisive politics of Trump.

There remain many deeply faithful and good evangelicals in this country, but they are – as Robinson seems to see it – only half of the tradition that motivated Ames and his forebears. Instead, many who would carry forward the spark of their decency – whether in the form of Ames’s grandfather’s passion or in the gentle pacifism of his father – have left the church altogether. Many of the people who claim no religion today are, she implies, descendants of a tradition they can no longer quite see.

In other words, Robinson’s Christianity is a reminder of the power and beauty of a faith that has either been coopted or forgotten.

As a consequence, Ames writes his book not just for his own child, but for all of us. If you do the math, his son is roughly his age at the time this book is published, 2004. The result is that the book functions as a kind of time capsule, one that suggests in the four generations of the Ameses in the book, we can see the arc of the ambition to build this country in the moral image of God.

If that sounds too grand – and it may well if you have read the modest way that Ames speaks of it in the book – then consider it’s part of Ames’s theology to find the middle ground where none might otherwise exist. He doesn’t compromise – it’s never anything as expedient as that. Instead, always questioning his own success, he rests on the certainties of his faith. He believes in a just providence, and he believes in the power of committed people to make the world at least a little better than it was. He does not condemn the fragmented tradition he describes. Instead, he makes it accessible once again. He lets his son, and the rest of us, see the way such simple and powerful faith has produced much of what is best in the America we have inherited.

As an appendix – and because the book can be tricky in its chronology – here is the timeline of events that show how the novel stretches from the end of the Revolutionary War generation to the present time.

• 1840’s – Grandfather has vision of abolition in Maine, age 16 (49) Moves to Kansas for Free-Soiler cause
• 1846 – Ames’s father born (170)
• 1865 – Ames’s father finds grandfather after Civil War, wounded (36)
• C. 1866 – Ames’s father, angry at grandfather’s pro-war stance, begins praying with the Quakers (193)
• 1870 – Edward Ames born (24)
• 1880 – Ames born born (9)
• 1882 – Moved to Gilead (9)
• 1886 – Edward leaves Gilead for college (25)
• 1890 – Grandfather leaves Gilead for Kansas (47)
• 1892 – Visited grandfather’s grave (9)
• 1902 – Boughton marries (29)
• 1905 – Louisa and Rebecca die (20)
• 1908 – Edward, with doctorate, home for visit (25)
• 1947 – Lila arrives in Gilead (161)
• 1948 – Jack Boughton’s son born (226)
• 1949 – Ames’s son born (7)
• 1956 – Ames, dying, writes his book
• 2004 – Ames’s son, approaching Ames’s age, implicitly reads book (at least, Robinson writes the book then) (3, 210)


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