Thursday, March 28, 2013

Marilynne Robinson's novels

Today marked the end of my journey through Robinson's three novels, Housekeeping, Gilead, and Home.  I had read Gilead during law school and enjoyed it, but I did not savor it.  What better time than retirement (as some have named this phase in my life) to really "feast" on her work.  (Not least because Gilead and Home both take place in Iowa, my land of exile.)

My English PhD pal Emily, who introduced me to Robinson with the recommendation of Gilead, directed me to the fact that Robinson waited 24 years to write her second novel.  That is either serious writer's block or measured restraint.

Gilead, her second novel, is indeed worthy of the Pulitzer Prize.  It is the most life-giving fiction I have read from a living voice in our culture.  Reading the story is to feel blessed to be alive, and I agree with the back-of-the-cover reviews that it will be one I return to again and again- as I've already read it twice in three years.  I cried many times throughout each of her novels, but the emotion was not one of despair, but of sweet, sad response to the "twining of joy and sorrow" on this earth (quoted material heard first from Mike Hsu...thanks for that emotive phrase).

As I'm returning Housekeeping and Home to the Des Moines Public Library today, I'll leave you with two of my favorite quotes from these works.

"Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it.  God Himself was pulled after us into the vortex we made when we fell, or so the story goes.  And while He was on earth He mended families.  He gave Lazarus back to his mother, and to the centurion he gave his daughter again.  He even restored the severed ear of the soldier who came to arrest Him-- a fact that allows us to hope the resurrection will reflect a considerable attention to detail.  

(Housekeeping, emphasis mine).

"Fealty to kin, actual and imagined, and the protection of them, possible or not, were their father's pride, his strongest instinct, and his chief source of satisfaction, frustration, and anxiety.  He had drawn himself up so that this words would have the force and dignity of their intent, but his eyes were closed and his mouth had turned down and the rectitude of his posture exposed his narrow shoulders and his fallen throat.  Jack gazed at him as if his father were the apparition of all the grief and weariness he had cost him, still gallant in his weakness, ready to be saddened again, to be burdened again."

(Home, when Robert Boughton, elderly and ailing Presbyterian minister, addresses his estranged son Jack about a delicate matter; Jack has struggled with alcoholism and stealing and been away from his family 20 years). 
     

1 comment:

  1. "Not least because Gilead and Home both take place in Iowa, my land of exile."

    I love that quote of yours and it made me laugh a little:)

    I will have to check these books out:)

    ReplyDelete