There might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

One of those rare books that I read extra slowly because I wanted it to last - a massive exercise in self-control.

Our narrator, John Ames, is a minister who knows he won't live to see his young son grow up. To do what he can to make up for that, he pens a long document to his son's future self. I could say that this book is simply about Ames reflecting on life, but reflection is never a simple process. Time lays out our life in a straight line, but memory rearranges it into a spider's web. Day-to-day events send reverberations into youth and middle age, childhood and legend.

Ames's words float up into a wide-open cosmos that inspires rapid exploration, but that also invites careful contemplation of the unspoken paths that brought each glowing thought out of the darkness. In its unassuming way, Gilead was gripping. It furnished me with a place of comfort without complacency, a place that I didn't want to leave.

It's a diary, a letter, and a sermon - a history of a world and a discourse on how to love it. But the how remains very much a question. Ames's introspection is interrupted (or accelerated) by the return of his best friend's miscreant son: Jack Boughton. At first, Ames is reluctant to reveal to the reader what Jack had done to earn so much distrust from a man who seems otherwise generous and forgiving. Ames is aware of his own fallible perspective. But as Jack grows closer to Ames's family, Ames takes a long look at the younger man's past and circles ever closer into his own blind spot.

Pivotal moments in characters' lives take place during sermons, which we watch from the viewpoints of both the preacher and the audience - and although the implication is that one is a messenger and the other is a receiver, the relationship is revealed to be far more complicated. We see how a single, silent audience member can occupy the speaker's thoughts more deeply than the speaker is occupying the thoughts of listeners. The reversal extends far beyond Sunday mornings, with several characters literally delivering sermons to Ames in the form of physical, written documents - documents that he himself composed years before, but that he now questions the truth of. More generally, a character whose help or blessing is sought often becomes a recipient of a new way of seeing the world.

In every important way we are secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and 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.

It is this acceptance of the mysterious, and the abundance of questions, that makes this book sincere and wondering rather than preachy.

View all my reviews