Gilead
By Marilynne Robinson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 247 pages, $23
In the main, the preacher has been a confounding figure prattling in the pulpit of American literature. Consider Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter,” or Sinclair Lewis’ charlatan in “Elmer Gantry,” or Flannery O’Connor’s Hazel Motes of “Wise Blood,” who founded his own bizarre church and “saw Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark where he was not sure of his footing.”
It is the lack of sure footing, however, that makes for compelling characters, and now this ecumenical group is joined by John Ames, born in 1880, a preacher and the son of a preacher who was himself the son of a preacher. This John Ames–a name he shared with his father and grandfather, a trinity holy and unholy–narrates “Gilead,” or rather he writes it, since the book is one long journal entry he addresses to his son. The publisher has put the name Marilynne Robinson on the cover of “Gilead” as well, an astonishment, for it has been nearly a quarter-century since her last novel appeared, the widely respected “Housekeeping,” and many have waited long to hear from her again.
“The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted,” Robinson wrote in “Housekeeping.” It was a passing observation there, but it is a perspective that suffuses “Gilead” like background keening. Where “Housekeeping” radiates youthful elan and near-nonchalance in response to life’s turmoil, “Gilead” speaks somewhat ruefully from age and fixity, and in that sense is an existential counterweight to the first novel.
“Our dream of life will end as dreams do end, abruptly and completely, when the sun rises, when the light comes,” preacher Ames tells his son and us. “And we will think, All that fear and all that grief were about nothing. But that cannot be true. I can’t believe we will forget our sorrows altogether. That would mean forgetting that we had lived, humanly speaking. Sorrow seems to me to be a great part of the substance of human life.”
Not for nothing is this book titled “Gilead.” Ostensibly, that’s after the Iowa town in which it takes place, but we should be mindful that the Bible says, “Go up to Gilead, and take balm” (Jeremiah 46:11), and as the old spiritual reminds us, “There is a balm in Gilead/To make the wounded whole.” So this is a site of healing, and from the very beginning of the novel, it is obvious that John Ames is among the wounded.
At 76, Ames is facing imminent heart failure; told that he suffers “angina pectoris,” the reverend comments that it “has a theological sound.” What he appears to mourn most is that he will not see his 6-year-old grow up. (After years spent alone following the death of a wife and child, Ames remarried late in life to a much younger woman.) Hence his resolve to inform his son of the important things in life generally, and in the Ameses’ life specifically, over the ensuing 240-plus pages.
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune actually take several forms as the novel progresses, shifting between the physical and the metaphysical, and from the familial to the fraternal, as the nature of Ames’ faith and life philosophy are probed in varied ways. Ames wrote 50 sermons a year for 45 years, or 2,250 overall. They are stuffed in the attic and fetched down piecemeal for reference from time to time by his wife, although he admits that reading through a half-century of his innermost life is “a terrible thought.” We have the abstract, instead.
“What to do with all the frustration and regret that builds up in this life?” Ames asks, and answers himself in long form in what amounts to a novel of subtle call-and-response. He worries about the limits of his own goodness, about leaving his wife and son destitute, about having his son know life and remember him. He projects for-ward, trying to imagine what his child will be like. He frets that he has misjudged a friend’s son who was given his name, and then equally horrific, that he has judged him correctly. We find ourselves in 1956, with Dwight Eisenhower running for the White House and our narrator reading up on the political views of Estes Kefauver, who was that year’s Democratic vice presidential candidate. But in a clever telescoping of time, we are at many points of the narration a century further back, in the years of “Bleeding Kansas” just before the Civil War.
Grandfather Ames, as it happens, had been a hellfire-and-brimstone preacher who, with pistol and sword, fought along-side abolitionist John Brown in the struggle to make the Territory of Kansas a state free of slavery. The dead old man–the John Ames who begat John Ames who begat John Ames–is a more vibrant presence than his still-living grandson in “Gilead,” and of a markedly different clerical tradition:
“My grandfather seemed to me stricken and afflicted, and indeed he was, like a man everlastingly struck by lightning, so that there was an ashiness about his clothes and his hair never settled and his eye had a look of tragic alarm when he wasn’t actually sleeping. He was the most unreposeful human being I ever knew, except for certain of his friends.”
Our narrator also recalls an argument between his father and grandfather, in which his father says to the old preacher:
” ‘I remember when you walked to the pulpit in that shot-up, bloody shirt with that pistol in your belt. And I had a thought as powerful and clear as any revelation. And it was, This has nothing to do with Jesus. Nothing. Nothing.’ “
Yet the old man had followed visions lifelong, and had traveled from Maine to Kansas as a teen-ager, specifically to fight slavery. “When I was a young man the Lord came to me and put His hand just here on my right shoulder,” he preached. “I can feel it still. And He spoke to me, very clearly. The words went right through me. He said, Free the captive.” Decades later, the old man frees his own captive self by deserting the family and running, without a word, back to Kansas. His son and grandson undertook to find his grave years later, and the account of that trip–its privation echoing biblical hardships–is one of the most tender and heartfelt sections of “Gilead.”
The distance between that old-time religion and the inspirational faith expressed by the narrator of “Gilead” is significant, and one of the developmental lines of the novel. But that’s not to mention the outright dissenters who appear for theological argument. The dying John’s brother, Edward, is one; he left Gilead for schooling in Germany and returned an atheist and admirer of philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, who maintained that the personality of God is simply the projected personality of man.
And then there’s the wayward son of Ames’ close friend, old Boughton. Old Boughton had named his boy John Ames Boughton to honor his colleague. Now 40-something and a troubled man, the younger Boughton has returned to Gilead after years adrift and manages to torment his aging father and the ailing Ames. Ames can’t admit his true thoughts to his friend and fears that when he dies, the younger Boughton will usurp his place as father and husband–a fear that threatens to become his own personal slavemaster.
We are left, ultimately, with a kind of sermonizing in “Gilead” that is more reaffirmative than it is bleak, despite the fact that Ames writes, even late in the book, “In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence.” The further question, Are we mutable or immutable? is argued out with Boughton’s son. Weary of heart but energetic in spirit, Ames believes in the possibility not just of redemption but of a self-willed resurrection too:
“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?”
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Art Winslow writes frequently about books and culture. He will be writer-in-residence at Western Michigan University this spring.
