Gilead
Ms NOLA was right to correct me about Gilead and The Master (comments to "You knew I was a wacko, no?" below), both "Notable Books" of 2004. I apologize for my unedited outburst; I try to be more careful about getting the facts right. In any case, I saw that Gilead was still in my "to do" pile, so I rolled up my sleeves and - discovered that I'd already said just what I wanted to say about this extraordinary book. Perhaps I kept it back with thoughts of making it longer. But longer, in this case, would not be better.
Gilead, Marilynne Robinson's second novel (FSG, 2004) is a beautiful book. It is also the most profoundly Christian book that I have ever read. To me, the thrust of Jesus's message was toward compassion and forgiveness, and if there's another novel out there that meditates as lucidly upon compassion and forgiveness, I'll be very heartily surprised. Between the moral beauty of the tale and the aesthetic beauty of the novel, however, there is a delicate tension that makes me reluctant to say very much about this book. I'm far too clumsy not to bump into something, or to miss, completely, something else. While the narrator of Gilead, John Ames, gradually finds himself engaged in what might be called a spiritual crisis, the novel itself is all about mortality.
Not for all the world would I sketch the outlines of John Ames's struggle. Even to say that the struggle does not begin until well after the point at which this reader began to wonder if the novel were going to be more than the accumulated observations of an old man, afflicted with angina pectoris - even to say this is perhaps to say too much...
Continue reading about Gilead at Portico.
