I’m writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you’ve done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God’s grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you.It is 1957, and at 77 and in failing health, the Congregationalist Minister of Gilead, Iowa, John Ames, has decided to write a long letter to his seven-year-old son; to record his "begats" and to impart all the wisdom that a younger father may have had years to teach a child. As a deeply religious man, there is much meditation on biblical verses, old sermons, and theological writing (especially those of Calvin), and as he acts out his own Gethsemane, Ames confronts and transcends the last lingering resentment of his long life.
At his advanced age, Ames' thoughts are meandering and he writes and thinks and circles back to add more detail to stories, eventually explaining his own childhood under the influence of an abolitionist Minister grandfather -- who preached his congregation into the Civil War with a gun tucked into his bloody shirt (all explained in time) -- and a pacifist Minister father who eventually lost his own faith. Ames recalls these stories while chronicling what he sees in the present; especially his joy in watching his son's amusements and his mistrust of the return of his friend's prodigal son. Bread and water -- communion and baptism -- are recurring themes and make up Ames' idea of the heaven he expects to witness before long:
Ashy biscuit, summer rain, her hair falling wet around her face. If I were to multiply the splendors of the world by two -- the splendors as I feel them -- I would arrive at an idea of heaven very unlike anything you see in the old paintings.Everything about Gilead is 100% believable -- if I had stumbled upon this as a found document, it could have been fascinating and I may have marvelled at the realism of the meandering memory, the profundity of the writer's thoughts, and the idiosyncrasy of what we choose to remember and record in the end. But because it's a work of fiction, I was often impatient with the sermonising (which I grant is totally authentic for Ames' character) and I was very often bored. Too many passages were like the following, sending my mind adrift:
In every important way we are such secrets from one another, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable -- which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, intraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.Marilynne Robinson won the Pulitzer Prize for Gilead, and insofar at that prize's purpose is to recognise American authors writing about American life, this is a logical win; through the three generations of preachers, it certainly captures a significant time span in an interesting place (the fictional town of Gilead is based on Tabor, Iowa: a place of importance in the abolitionist movement). Apparently, Robinson's primary objective was to correct public misconceptions about Puritanism and Calvinism, and while Ames had theological discussions that accomplished this -- and as he also faced the end of his life with joy and wonder -- her objective was met, but my interest was lost. The big picture left me cold, but there were so very many small and perfect moments:
Why do I love the thought of you old? That first twinge of arthritis in your knee is a thing I imagine with all the tenderness I felt when you showed me your loose tooth.The failure to connect with Gilead is entirely my own: many praise it as a modern classic and I can't explain why I would have enjoyed it more had this been an actual memoir; yet I cannot think to whom I might recommend this book. And after yet another disappointment, I think I'm done with Pulitzer winners for a while.
