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For reading ease, each review on Gilead by Marilynne Robinson will be on approximately 50 pages of the book and will continue for approximately five reviews and occur fortnightly. Be sure to check out Amanda’s and Laura’s reviews as well. You may buy Gilead here. Robinson’s other novel, Housekeeping is also highly recommended.

This initial review is meant to give you a feel for the novel more than anything; subsequent reviews will likely emphasise particular questions the novel raises or particular moments I find captivating. Please note as well that these reviews are intended for the general reader and thus, I will not be dealing with the sort of intricacies that we ‘lit postgrads’ like to focus on.

*****

Gilead tells a very simple story: a man — in this case, a minister, John Ames — writes a memoir to his young son (to be read when he grows up) as he is dying so that the son can understand from where he came. It is a generational memoir, one that has echoes (at least for me) to books like Alistair MacLeod’s No Great Mischief. I take a lot of stock on first sentences. Here’s Robinson’s opening sentence:

‘I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I’m old, and you said, I don’t think you’re old’.

The sentence justifies the whole project of the book — to take stock of one’s life before going ‘to be with the Good Lord’, while negotiating the present; in short it speaks of the central relationship of the novel between a man and his son. And yet this relationship is as unspoken in many ways as Robinson’s effortless transitions between the narrator’s memories, for it is primarily a writing of the past to a future generation that may or may not read it. The piling on of question and answer in this first sentence seems indicative of the narrator’s style on the whole: a sort of joyous, reflective, melancholic meandering through the mundane and profound of generational and personal past, present and future. Because of this meandering it’s pretty impossible to pin the novel down; as a reader, we sit with or read over the shoulder of John Ames’ grown-up child, following along the paths of thought and inspiration wherever they may lead.

The first fifty-or-so pages take the reader from the narrative present (1956), surmise about the future when Ames’ son will read this account (including Ames’ wonderings if his son will read it at all), travel back to Ames’ own childhood and detail his trip with his father to find his grandfather’s unmarked grave in Gilead, his early years as a minister during the Great War where people ate peaches for patriotism and covered their faces with scarves and onions to ward off influenza, and the anecdotes of his own parents growing old where ‘eccentricities were thwarted passion’ (39) and where his mother hid her nickels in her bodice to keep her husband from giving away their last coins to the down-and-outers.

In some ways, the book is more poetry than prose, the way it paints vivid images that sparkle for an instant — such as the couple Ames remembers in the Sunday rain where ‘a storm of luminous water came pouring down on the two of them’ from a branch and prompts their laughter and then Ames’ narration in the present: ‘I don’t know why I thought of that now, except perhaps because it is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing vegetables and doing the wash’ (32). Everyday images lead to moments of realisation and reflection, of missed opportunites and testify to a life of humility, solitude, fervour and amazement at the world around him.

So, I can’t really do a systematic review of a novel like Gilead; it’s a novel that sits with you, that makes you laugh and tear up and a narrative that circles throughout narrative time like any ‘real life’ story. It is extremely well written, in a sort of Puritan ’simple style’ that teaches me, at least, of the importance of dwelling in and with rather than just getting through. I think it’s a novel I’d like to re-read throughout my life to glean more wisdom.

This entry was posted by Ashley on Monday, June 6th, 2005 at 11:14 pm. This entry was tagged with Literature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.