And anybody at all can see it, but you can't.

Completed January 12th, 2015

Lila by Marilynne Robinson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I find that one of the best things fiction can do is to help me remember that other people - with all their different beliefs and backgrounds and aspirations - are as fully human as I am. Lila is about two people working towards that understanding. Lila spent most of her life roaming the midwestern US, sometimes alone and sometimes in the company of other itinerant workers. What she lacks in a conventional education she makes up for by being a sharp observer and a deep thinker. These traits permeate the narrative. Her eventual husband, John Ames, is a Calvinist minister who tries to enable Lila to have a happy existence in small-town Gilead, knowing that he may never succeed and that she may someday return to her earlier way of living.

They seem an unlikely match. Lila, at first, seems to have little use for the theological concepts that Ames has devoted his life to contemplating. Worse, she struggles to see where people like herself and those she grew up around - areligious, struggling to get by, and sometimes forced to do things they'd rather not - fit into a Christian worldview. But gradually, they come to understand each other and themselves better. Lila reads challenging portions of the Bible and asks serious questions, which Ames gives a great deal of thought to as he tries to learn more about her. Lila has a deeply-held mistrustfulness that developed during a lifetime of violence and abandonment. Ames treats her with patience and solicitousness, almost (but not quite) too afraid to look forward to a future together. They are two of the most distinctive characters that I have encountered recently, and their interactions give rise to insights that neither would be likely to absorb on their own.

“So joy can be joy and sorrow can be sorrow, with neither of them casting either light or shadow on the other.”

A flaw of the book is that it meanders a little too much at times. But, that's easy to put up with when the book as a whole isn't very long, with remarkable weight in its small size. It's rare to find a story that tackles the challenges of grace the way that this one does - amazed and questioning and filled with a need to pay it forward, free from either proselytization or cynicism.

[Read for the Read Harder Challenge: a romance]

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