[book post] Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
May. 16th, 2024 04:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
queenluaAfter I read Gilead, I found myself thumbing through my phone contacts and texting anyone and everyone who I even vaguely suspected might've read this book. And it's a weird, specific kind of book, so the list of people I wound up texting looked something like "my mom, a friend of my mom's whom I remembered vaguely from book clubs at our house when I was little, and an acquaintance from undergrad who studied folklore & mythology." I asked each of them: did you read this? can we talk about it, please, I'm d e s p e r a t e to talk about this book with someone???
And I couldn't find anyone who'd read the damn thing! So I was left wrestling with it by myself these past few weeks.
See, the whole reason I was desperate to talk to someone is: this novel has a lot going on, multiple threads that pull together in a satisfying way—but by the end, I found myself puzzling over what to make of the whole?
I'm still puzzling, but I've got at least some notion now, I think.
The high-level summary: John Ames is a seventy-six year old Congregationalist minister in the tiny town of Gilead, Iowa, in the year 1956. He unexpectedly found love, late in life, with a thirtysomething woman he married, and they now have a seven-year-old son. But Ames has been told he has a heart condition, and not long to live, so Ames decides to write a series of letters to his son, so his son can read them when he's older, and understand the kind of man his father was.
This letters-to-Ames's-son framing ties together three main narrative threads:
(1) Ames's reflections on his own family's legacy. Not only is Ames a minister: his father was a minister, and his father's father before him was also a minister. But the temperament of his grandfather and his father could not be more different. His grandfather was a righteous warrior—a man who moved to this corner of Iowa specifically to be a part of the Bleeding Kansas proto-civil-war on the side of the abolitionists. He sheltered John Brown and other abolitionist figures and their munitions within his church. When a government agent came to investigate, the grandfather shot the agent dead—then preached the righteousness of just war the very next morning. Ames's father, however, saw this speech—the grandfather with blood still on his shirt, and with bits of spittle flying from his lips as he goaded young men to their deaths—and, that day, he opted to start sitting with the Quaker congregation in town instead. The father became convinced that war and violence can't be the way, no matter what the justification, and chose pacifism as his creed the whole rest of his life.
The portraits of these two men are doled out in pieces, then all at once. And the way Ames's meditation on their legacy implicitly frames Bleeding Kansas as a knotty struggle for the heart of America itself—ah! It has the resonance of an unresolved chord, haunting and unsettling while still being very very beautiful. If the whole book had been just this it would've been an easy 10/10.
(2) Also effective, although more muted, are Ames's reflections on his older brother. Edward Ames, a man ten years John's senior (and who thus functions a bit more like an uncle than a brother), was a whip-sharp, daring young man, who got himself a PhD in Germany and came back an atheist. Which obviously won't fly in small-town Iowa—he makes a scene, his first night home, when he says he can't say grace before dinner.
But Edward isn't an /r/atheism stereotype, out to reflexively rebel—this whole arc beautifully illustrates of the way the careful dance between Edward and his parents, and between Edward and John, plays out—the ways in which they test what can be talked about versus what should be tactfully avoided, and the way their relationships strain but then becomes closer than ever:
When these threads work, they work. Ames sounds very precisely like an Old Grandpa Just Telling You Stuff; I kept hearing passages in my mind in the same cadence of my own beloved late grandfather. The prose strikes that perfect balance between "sounding authentically like the voice of Just Some Guy" and "actually having a crafted beauty all its own." There's a sense of immanence here, every little thing in this little town made numinous because Ames is experiencing so much of it for probably-the-last-time, in a way that reminded me, at times, bizarrely, of Disco Elysium.
But there's also... a sadness, immense, just beneath everything. Lila (Ames's wife) is sad because the man she loves will die long before her; Jack is sad for reasons that remain inscrutable until near the very end, but are nonetheless palpable well before then; what few people Ames is close to are growing old and dying; the town's population is shrinking and tired and sad. When we learn that Ames's parents left Iowa one winter, for a little cottage on the Gulf Coast that Edward built for them, and never came back, we learn that Ames's parents tried to get Ames to come along too:
And sure, it's great he found this late, immensely sweet love, but I couldn't help but wonder: where did those decades and decades go! why didn't you go to join your parents? what's the thing holding you here, except history, which doesn't seem strong enough on its own? why is someone who is certainly no fool somehow so unagenic? He only ever speaks of his congregation in generalities, never in particulars—always holding himself just a bit apart from the life of the town—in a way that made me want to shake him.
I couldn't tell if I was sad because Robinson meant for this portrait of small-town midwest life to be existentially distressing, or because Robinson just didn't realize how sad this all ultimately feels?
Maybe I'm too like Edward to really "get" what it is that keeps Ames in Gilead. It's a puzzle I've wondered over in my own life, honestly: what would it have taken to make me stay in Kentucky? My mom laments often that I left home for such a far-away place. But there's a touch of old resignation and acceptance in her laments—because she remembers, ever since I was very little, my declarations I would someday live in California or Japan or some other glamorous place, and while I didn't end up in exactly those spots, well—it's pretty similarly far as the crow flies. The local religion just didn't quite "take" with me, and I realized pretty young it probably never would—I was out-of-step in some way I couldn't put a finger on.
But my brother, raised under the same roof with the same parents, never had so much as a twinge of my wanderlust, left Kentucky only with great reluctance, and zipped back to the most culturally-similar place he could find as soon as he was able. (A law school girlfriend dragged him on vacation to Paris, once; when I asked him how it was, his only commentary was, "it was okay" and "I couldn't find a good gym to work out in.") He ambitions in life are a little more traditional and old-school; he's more religious; he still has the accent that I lost.
Except: with my brother, I see what it is he values in Kentucky; I understand completely the things that make him stay closer to home. But I just couldn't quite solve that puzzle with Ames?
I did wonder, a bit, if Robinson was going for a The Remains of the Day kind of deal—if we're supposed to find Ames's life incredibly sad, if we're supposed to look at him with pity and see his life as a bit of a waste.
And there's aspects of that, certainly. We only really learn about the town's poverty in little fits and bursts, in a way that's clearly meant to be a slow-motion oh-no-oh-no kind of reveal, and his passing mention of "the black church" in town—and how that once-thriving congregation has shrunk to nothing—resonates sharply & uncomfortably with the poetic recounting we get of the town's now-distant abolitionist history.
But Ames's wide-eyed appreciation of the graces he does enjoy is so endearing, and his voice so omnipresent and key to the framing of the story, that I don't think Robinson really intends for an Ishiguro-esque effect here.
Or, at least, that's what other people seemed to get out of it. Multiple reviewers seem to laud its portrait of small town life, its middle-America focus, the story's steadfast belief that these lives and stories are valuable and worth sharing.
I also like the middle-America focus. I do think these stories are worth telling. (In particular, I'm terribly curious to read the sequel Lila, which promises to give us the backstory for Ames's young wife, because I have a very strong hunch that Lila's story—coming from a rough place into a place of safety—will much better illuminate the virtues and foibles of this corner of the world both.)
But, for me, Gilead came the closest to really singing in the rare passages when Ames turns his exacting eye on his circumstances and feels, not immanence, but something more sinister:
Weird book. Not at all what I expected! If you've read it, PLEASE sound off in the comments; I Wish To Talk With You About It
(a couple other reviews I found interesting while puzzling over this: [x], [y], [z])
And I couldn't find anyone who'd read the damn thing! So I was left wrestling with it by myself these past few weeks.
See, the whole reason I was desperate to talk to someone is: this novel has a lot going on, multiple threads that pull together in a satisfying way—but by the end, I found myself puzzling over what to make of the whole?
I'm still puzzling, but I've got at least some notion now, I think.
The high-level summary: John Ames is a seventy-six year old Congregationalist minister in the tiny town of Gilead, Iowa, in the year 1956. He unexpectedly found love, late in life, with a thirtysomething woman he married, and they now have a seven-year-old son. But Ames has been told he has a heart condition, and not long to live, so Ames decides to write a series of letters to his son, so his son can read them when he's older, and understand the kind of man his father was.
This letters-to-Ames's-son framing ties together three main narrative threads:
(1) Ames's reflections on his own family's legacy. Not only is Ames a minister: his father was a minister, and his father's father before him was also a minister. But the temperament of his grandfather and his father could not be more different. His grandfather was a righteous warrior—a man who moved to this corner of Iowa specifically to be a part of the Bleeding Kansas proto-civil-war on the side of the abolitionists. He sheltered John Brown and other abolitionist figures and their munitions within his church. When a government agent came to investigate, the grandfather shot the agent dead—then preached the righteousness of just war the very next morning. Ames's father, however, saw this speech—the grandfather with blood still on his shirt, and with bits of spittle flying from his lips as he goaded young men to their deaths—and, that day, he opted to start sitting with the Quaker congregation in town instead. The father became convinced that war and violence can't be the way, no matter what the justification, and chose pacifism as his creed the whole rest of his life.
The portraits of these two men are doled out in pieces, then all at once. And the way Ames's meditation on their legacy implicitly frames Bleeding Kansas as a knotty struggle for the heart of America itself—ah! It has the resonance of an unresolved chord, haunting and unsettling while still being very very beautiful. If the whole book had been just this it would've been an easy 10/10.
(2) Also effective, although more muted, are Ames's reflections on his older brother. Edward Ames, a man ten years John's senior (and who thus functions a bit more like an uncle than a brother), was a whip-sharp, daring young man, who got himself a PhD in Germany and came back an atheist. Which obviously won't fly in small-town Iowa—he makes a scene, his first night home, when he says he can't say grace before dinner.
But Edward isn't an /r/atheism stereotype, out to reflexively rebel—this whole arc beautifully illustrates of the way the careful dance between Edward and his parents, and between Edward and John, plays out—the ways in which they test what can be talked about versus what should be tactfully avoided, and the way their relationships strain but then becomes closer than ever:
(Context: John's describing a time he and Edward played catch together after Edward got in a fight with their parents.)(3) Which leaves us to our last prodigal son narrative. John Ames's best friend, the town's Presbyterian minister Robert Boughton, has a whole passel of children—but his son Jack is clearly the most beloved of them, and the most wayward of them. After a long unexplained absence, Jack has returned to Gilead, and it's clear from the way Ames writes about him that he is deeply bothered by the mere presence of this damn kid (now fortysomething) back in his town. Much of the book's tension is in the slow revelation of why Ames hates Jack so much and what exactly has brought Jack home.
I thought after that day [Edward and I] would sometime be able to talk. That did not prove to be the case. All the same, after that day I did feel pretty much at ease about the state of his soul. Though of course I am not competent to judge.
Here is what he said [...]
That is from Psalm 133. It meant he knew everything I knew, every single word. Perhaps he was telling me that he knew everything I knew and he was not persuaded by it. Still, I have often thought what a splendid thing that was for him to do. I wished my father had been there, because I knew it would have made him laugh. He still had a decent arm for a man his age. I, being very young at the time, believed they would never reconcile, and I was surprised that Edward could take the whole situation as calmly as he seemed to. I told him that I had begun reading Feuerbach, and he wiggled his big eyebrows at me and said, "Don't let your mama catch you doing that!"
When these threads work, they work. Ames sounds very precisely like an Old Grandpa Just Telling You Stuff; I kept hearing passages in my mind in the same cadence of my own beloved late grandfather. The prose strikes that perfect balance between "sounding authentically like the voice of Just Some Guy" and "actually having a crafted beauty all its own." There's a sense of immanence here, every little thing in this little town made numinous because Ames is experiencing so much of it for probably-the-last-time, in a way that reminded me, at times, bizarrely, of Disco Elysium.
But there's also... a sadness, immense, just beneath everything. Lila (Ames's wife) is sad because the man she loves will die long before her; Jack is sad for reasons that remain inscrutable until near the very end, but are nonetheless palpable well before then; what few people Ames is close to are growing old and dying; the town's population is shrinking and tired and sad. When we learn that Ames's parents left Iowa one winter, for a little cottage on the Gulf Coast that Edward built for them, and never came back, we learn that Ames's parents tried to get Ames to come along too:
[. . .] it was [my father's] hope that I would seek out a larger life than this. He and Edward both felt strongly what excellent use I could make of a broader experience [. . .] When I mentioned the history we had here, he laughed and said, "Old, unhappy far-off things and battles long ago." And that irritated me. He said, "Just look at this place. Every time a tree gets to a decent size, the wind comes along and breaks it." He was expounding the wonders of the larger world, and I was resolving in my heart never to risk the experience of them. He said, "I have become aware that we here lived within the limits of notions that were very old and even very local. I want you to understand that you do not have to be loyal to them."So Ames says in Gilead, but what does he get from that? By this point, we've read at length about the decades and decades Ames spent living alone, eating fried egg sandwiches and listening to baseball games, eternally at work on the sermon he's writing for next week's service, because there's always the next week, as soon as you wrap up this week's—and while Ames refers to this as a lonely time, he never seemed to do much to change it, nor seemed even self-aware enough to let his discontent rise to the level of protest—just stoically bore it. Even that late love of his wasn't something he sought out so much as something that happened to him—Lila shows up in church one day from nowhere; and she's the one who asks him to marry her.
He thought he could excuse me from my loyalty, as if it were loyalty to him, as if it were just some well-intended mistake he could correct for me, as if it were not loyalty to myself at the very least, putting the Lord to one side, so to speak, since I knew perfectly well at that time, as I had for years and years, that the Lord absolutely transcends any understanding I have of Him, which makes loyalty to Him a different thing from loyalty to whatever customs and doctrines and memories I happen to associate with Him [. . .] How ignorant did he think I was? I had read Owen and James and Huxley and Swedenborg and, for heaven's sake, Blavatsky, as he well knew, since he had virtually read them over my shoulder. I subscribed to The Nation. I was never Edward, but I was no fool either, and I almost said as much [. . .] I couldn't believe he would speak to me as if I were not competent to invest my loyalties as I saw fit. How could I accept the advice of someone who had such a low estimation of me?
And sure, it's great he found this late, immensely sweet love, but I couldn't help but wonder: where did those decades and decades go! why didn't you go to join your parents? what's the thing holding you here, except history, which doesn't seem strong enough on its own? why is someone who is certainly no fool somehow so unagenic? He only ever speaks of his congregation in generalities, never in particulars—always holding himself just a bit apart from the life of the town—in a way that made me want to shake him.
I couldn't tell if I was sad because Robinson meant for this portrait of small-town midwest life to be existentially distressing, or because Robinson just didn't realize how sad this all ultimately feels?
Maybe I'm too like Edward to really "get" what it is that keeps Ames in Gilead. It's a puzzle I've wondered over in my own life, honestly: what would it have taken to make me stay in Kentucky? My mom laments often that I left home for such a far-away place. But there's a touch of old resignation and acceptance in her laments—because she remembers, ever since I was very little, my declarations I would someday live in California or Japan or some other glamorous place, and while I didn't end up in exactly those spots, well—it's pretty similarly far as the crow flies. The local religion just didn't quite "take" with me, and I realized pretty young it probably never would—I was out-of-step in some way I couldn't put a finger on.
But my brother, raised under the same roof with the same parents, never had so much as a twinge of my wanderlust, left Kentucky only with great reluctance, and zipped back to the most culturally-similar place he could find as soon as he was able. (A law school girlfriend dragged him on vacation to Paris, once; when I asked him how it was, his only commentary was, "it was okay" and "I couldn't find a good gym to work out in.") He ambitions in life are a little more traditional and old-school; he's more religious; he still has the accent that I lost.
Except: with my brother, I see what it is he values in Kentucky; I understand completely the things that make him stay closer to home. But I just couldn't quite solve that puzzle with Ames?
I did wonder, a bit, if Robinson was going for a The Remains of the Day kind of deal—if we're supposed to find Ames's life incredibly sad, if we're supposed to look at him with pity and see his life as a bit of a waste.
And there's aspects of that, certainly. We only really learn about the town's poverty in little fits and bursts, in a way that's clearly meant to be a slow-motion oh-no-oh-no kind of reveal, and his passing mention of "the black church" in town—and how that once-thriving congregation has shrunk to nothing—resonates sharply & uncomfortably with the poetic recounting we get of the town's now-distant abolitionist history.
But Ames's wide-eyed appreciation of the graces he does enjoy is so endearing, and his voice so omnipresent and key to the framing of the story, that I don't think Robinson really intends for an Ishiguro-esque effect here.
Or, at least, that's what other people seemed to get out of it. Multiple reviewers seem to laud its portrait of small town life, its middle-America focus, the story's steadfast belief that these lives and stories are valuable and worth sharing.
I also like the middle-America focus. I do think these stories are worth telling. (In particular, I'm terribly curious to read the sequel Lila, which promises to give us the backstory for Ames's young wife, because I have a very strong hunch that Lila's story—coming from a rough place into a place of safety—will much better illuminate the virtues and foibles of this corner of the world both.)
But, for me, Gilead came the closest to really singing in the rare passages when Ames turns his exacting eye on his circumstances and feels, not immanence, but something more sinister:
"I woke up this morning thinking this town might as well be standing on the absolute floor of hell for all the truth there is in it, and the fault is mine as much as anyone's. I was thinking about the things that had happened here just in my lifetime—the droughts and the influenza and the Depression and three terrible wars. It seems to me now we never looked up from the trouble we had just getting by to put the obvious question, that is, to ask what it was the Lord was trying to make us understand [...]
Well, we didn't ask the question, so the question was just taken away from us. We became like the people without the Law, people who didn't know their right hand from their left. Just stranded here. A stranger might ask why there is a town here at all. Our own children might ask. And who could answer them? It was a dogged little outpost in the sand hills, within striking distance of Kansas. That's really all it was meant to be. It was a place John Brown and Jim Lane could fall back on when they needed to heal and rest. There must have been a hundred little towns like it, set up in the heat of an old urgency that is all forgotten now, and their littleness and their shabbiness, which was the measure of the courage and passion that went into making them, now just look awkward and provincial and ridiculous, even to the people who have lived here long enough to know better."
Weird book. Not at all what I expected! If you've read it, PLEASE sound off in the comments; I Wish To Talk With You About It
(a couple other reviews I found interesting while puzzling over this: [x], [y], [z])
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Date: 2024-05-17 12:09 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2024-05-20 06:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-08-09 07:47 pm (UTC)I... do have a theory about why Ames stayed in Gilead all his life. It's very simple and kind of quotidian, but: I think it's because Louisa and Angeline are buried there. He talks about that quest to find his grandfather's grave relatively early in the book and it clearly had an effect on him, he also thinks about Louisa and Angeline with so much fondness (even if they've been dead for something like fifty years), and there was that passing mention about some of the widows of WWI not leaving the town because their families were buried there. (And also that story about the town that dug a tunnel, had a horse fall in it and then relocated out of embarrassment mentions that they had to relocate the grave markers, too.) I don't know whether Ames himself would word it quite like this, but that's the sense that I got.
The part that you quoted where Ames Sr asks Ames to join them and Ames simply resolves to Not makes sense to me through that lens - but I think there's also a sense of duty towards the parishioners that haven't left (and towards Boughton, maybe?) and also a kind of... obstinacy that I recognized. I'm sort of your opposite in that I've never lived outside my city of birth on a permanent basis. It is a large city by the standards of my country, but compared to the metropolises of Western Europe or even any of the neighbouring countries it's a small town. And I think I would react in that same hackles-up how-about-never way if someone told me that I should broaden my horizons and gtfo. I know it's not the best or fanciest or the most cutting-edge place, but it's mine.
On a Doylist level I wonder if we're meant to remain a little unclear about why Ames never left - the book is letters to his son and the kid probably never really had an answer either.
(The Terra Ignota fan in me says: *Mycroft Canner voice* Providence, obviously. :P)
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Date: 2024-08-12 08:19 pm (UTC)and yeah yeah the "louisa/angeline buried there" thing makes. a ton of sense. harmonizes a lot of the stuff mentioned earlier in the narrative.
these were really good thoughts & now i am thinking very fondly for the book again, ty again~
(also LOL @ Providence... indeed, mr. canner haha)
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Date: 2025-05-06 06:27 pm (UTC)I... I have to admit I was reminded of Gilead most recently and absurdly by watching Conclave. It feels VERY silly to compare a piece of literary fiction that, whatever its flaws, certainly strives for psychological and theological depth... to a campy quasi-political thriller that only at the very end veers into weird messianic hopes of redemption for a corrupt Church by the grace of, for once, not driving the saintly stranger-outsider from the door... but I think the comparison occurs to me because, indeed, Robinson seems to love Ames and expect the reader to find him lovable largely on the strength of his ability to receive an externally-mediated revelation. As all the reviewers note, he's intensively passive (sometimes passive-aggressive), and his great moment of grace is the chance to see his own limitations, cowardice, and vanity from the outside; not to save himself but to be saved. It's like Emma Woodhouse marveling over her stupidity/exalted by humble gratitude that it hasn't ruined everything, to make another odd comparison--except in the case of Emma that comes on the heels of an active struggle for control, whereas with Ames Robinson more gestures than commits to the idea that his stubborn, self-imposed hermitage is as much an act of pride as love.
I do think Gilead would be more successful if it was willing to hold Ames accountable for his inaction, rather than telling a story of involuntary blindness pierced by involuntary insight. I believe that Robinson wants to sustain the paradox of compassion and respect for the individual able to change, however late, and recognition for the cost of the time it took, but I think part of the problem is that she has too little faith in the reader's ability to independently see value in Ames' history-keeping and devotion to the place--and has a very tender, sentimental feeling for it herself--so that the narrative feels overstuffed with reminders that the local, the rooted, the deep rather than the broad is irreplaceable, and the attempts to ironize his defensiveness often come across as mere scrupulous modesty on his part. One of the reasons Remains of the Day really works is because Ishiguro is willing to let Stevens make himself ridiculous constantly, rather than always rushing to reassure us of some level of self-awareness, even if not one that leads to actual growth.
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Date: 2025-05-07 09:09 pm (UTC)i barked a laugh at the Conclave comparison, haha, but... the connection makes a lot of sense the way you explain it! & made some parts of the book click for me in a way that they hadn't before.
and it's interesting coming back & thinking over what i wrote here so shortly after i finally read Home... the latter novel feels "cleaner" overall, less ambitious/sweeping, but shares a certain... static-ness, with Gilead, i think?
much to ponder; i'm likely to take a stab at Lila here pretty soon. thanks again for the thoughts!!!
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Date: 2025-05-08 03:07 am (UTC)