Morning freight - Barboursville, Virginia

Summer Reading

I recently posted about Marilynne Robinson's Pulitzer Prize winning novel Gilead here. I just finished reading Gilead for the second time, after reading Robinson's most recent novel Home. Home is set in the same location, and with the same characters as Gilead. It is neither sequel or prequel,  but takes place concurrently with the earlier novel. While Gilead is a first-person meditation, Home is more of a traditional narrative. Both books are beautifully written and moving and difficult to summarize.

In  an essay entitled "Family," (from The Death of Adam, 1998) Robinson writes:

"We have forgotten solace. Maybe the saddest family, properly understood, is a miracle of solace. It seems to me that our multitude of professional healers and comforters are really meant to function like the doctor in a boxer's corner, there to slow bleeding and minimize swelling so that we will be able to last another round. Neither they nor we want to think about the larger meaning of the situation. This is the opposite of solace.

Imagine that someone failed and disgraced came back to his family, and they grieved with him, and took his sadness upon themselves, and sat down together to ponder the deep mysteries of human life. This is more human and beautiful, I propose, even if it yields no dulling of pain, no patching of injuries. Perhaps it is the calling of some families to console , because intractable grief is visited upon them." 

Even though this was written 10 years before the publication of Home, it is a perfect statement of the central theme of the novel.

Marilynne Robinson's writing stands in stark contrast to the facile and shallow treatment of religious and spiritual themes that is commonplace in literature and the arts these days. But far from being other-worldly, Home and Gilead offer a clear and deep vision of the sorrow and pain, the beauty and wonder of the world around us every day. It is this vision, this ability to see, that brings me back to ponder and re-read these books.

Home, by Marilynne Robinson, Farrar, Straus and Giroux/Picador, New York, 2008