Robinson, Marilynne - Gilead

“Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it?” - Gilead

When people learn I’m going for a degree in English, they often ask about my favorite authors. Interestingly, they always assume my favorite authors will be dead guys (or gals), and in fact they are basically justified. I do have a short list of contemporary authors worth reading (J.M. Coetze, David James Duncan, Solzhenitsyn, etc.) but it is a -short list (and Solzhenitsyn will probably die soon). The fact is I’ve not been very impressed with a lot of what is being written nowadays; it takes a lot of time and effort to find something that gets beyond an interesting gimmick. Instead, as with movies (which usually have a price tag beyond my meager grad-student means), I usually let the reviewers do some of that work for me.

So I was excited to have a chance to read Marilynne Robinson’s second novel, because I have never read or heard anything negative about it. Having read it, I think it may just be the case that there is nothing negative to say about it. Or, just as likely, everyone who has read it would feel uncomfortable, even down-right mean, were they to try to make a criticism of it. That’s because this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is one of the most ambitiously modest works you are likely to ever read. And yet, when you sit down to read it, it feels like the most important thing you could be doing in that moment.

My paperback edition is covered front and back with laudatory, sometimes hyperbolic blurbs crowning Robinson with all the literary laurels the critics can muster, which certainly creates a sense of expectation in the newcomer. By the book’s end I realized all the praises were true, but not necessarily for the reasons I had imagined. There is nothing particularly epic, or tragic, or dramatic, or any of those genre-words we use to denote the portrayal of grand themes and grand emotions—but that is not to say the book isn’t grand. In fact, Robinson’s achievement is precisely to render the ordinary in its spiritual grandeur.

“Spiritual reality,” I almost said, for the overwhelming feeling of reading the book is that the world of Gilead, Iowa is so much more real than our own world—and yet, in a way, it also makes our world seem very, very real. The novel is written from the perspective of John Ames, a third-generation preacher in this small, rural community. Ames entered his second marriage late in life, and upon learning of a heart condition he begins his memoir as a kind of love-letter to his young son, pouring into it the wisdom and stories of his experience that he will not live to tell himself. Ames writes patiently and with a disarming honesty about his father and grandfather, about his first wife and daughter, and about his own triumphs and failures as a minister, a husband, and a father. Yet in Ames we do not see a man passing down knowledge of life’s answers, but one still asking the questions, and sharing what he can about how to seek the answers.

The how of seeking answers is what distinguishes these stories from any other stories. A lifetime of living with and in the Scriptures infuses Ames’s perception of reality with a clarity that transcends the language used to express it. Thus the series of largely mundane events in the novel each acquire a numinous quality, are each transfigured by faith even before Ames himself fully comprehends them. Indeed, comprehension is not the point, and this is why the stories in Gilead do not quite amount to one overarching, coherent narrative. Rather, Ames models for us the process of reflection by which we examine our experience to discover the sanctity within it—or, as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, “the dearest freshness deep down things.” Life becomes a series of opportunities to connect with others or to keep them at a distance, and the consequences may never be known.

The inside cover of my paperback contains a quote from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that says “Readers with no interest in religion will find pleasure in this hymn to existence,” and I hope they will. But I also hope they resist the secular urge to reduce the specifically Christian spirituality within it to a general, nameless “spirituality.” If a Muslim or Jew or Hindu were to sit down and write with the same method and intent as did Robinson, they might very well create a book as beautiful and luminous as Gilead, but I daresay we would find the issues and concerns elaborated with significant differences—and different significances. The Fall lurks quietly beneath everything in the novel as the principle of division, that human perversity which even comes between people who desire to know one another better. And the Incarnation, God’s appearance in the flesh of this earthly existence, is what makes it possible for Ames to look back upon life and love it so dearly.

Still, I would like to find such a series of books, for if they were as real as Gilead, they would no doubt go far toward creating understanding of the beauty and virtue at the heart of the human religious impulse, while making it clear that the content of one’s faith conditions one’s perceptions of the world. To see the world as transfigured requires that some power inheres within it that makes it so—as opposed to some power within us that confers beauty upon things—and any such power, did it exist, would by its very existence have a claim on the one who perceived it—this is what Ames means when he asks “who could have the courage to see it?”

Gilead is such a novel with courage to look, and to see, and to name that transfigured reality, such a fiction as proves faith real because it could not be written without it. Gilead reads like a devotional, and it should therefore be read slowly, in a quiet hour, and with a patient attention to its earnest desire to communicate something true. Ames reflects that it seems “sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation and it turns to radiance—for a moment or a year or the span of a life. And then it sinks back into itself again, and to look at it no one would know it had anything to do with fire, or light.” What God does for Creation, Robinson does for American fiction, elevating story to a hot, vibrant pitch such that, for a moment, the world is wonderful, novels have power, and hope is possible.