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[book post] Home by Marilynne Robinson
I was having a chat with someone recently about different theories of soteriology—as a former Southern Baptist amongst a bunch of thoroughly-secular-from-birth jackrabbits, I get a charge out of explaining weirdo protestant folk-theology stuff when it comes up—and when I mentioned there's a set of Christians who believe "hell is real, but people in hell are free to repent & be saved from it at any time they choose," he was surprised and puzzled.
"Wouldn't everyone simply choose to leave hell, in that case? Like, if I died and woke up in hell, pretty quick I'd be like... welp, I sure called that shot wrong. Guess I'd better repent."
I pointed out that repentance, in Christian thought, isn't just an acknowledgment of "well, Jesus was right after all." It entails a change of character, an act of submission: ye shall know them by their fruits.
He shrugged. "I mean. I'm still in hell. Repentance seems like the better alternative?"
I mean, yeah, sure seems that way! But the intuitive comparison that made sense to me, back when I was a Christian, was: have you ever done something wrong, and you knew you did something wrong, but you dragged and dragged your feet on making amends and apologizing, because the horribleness of standing face-to-face with the person you wronged felt impossibly painful, even worse than just choking down your own shame and getting on as best as possible? The people in hell feel that way, I imagine.
Anyone who's experienced an act of undeserved mercy knows the surprise and the sheer relief of the thing, I think. All the moreso if it's granted without fuss, without fanfare, plainly and automatically and wholly. But I think they also know how horrible and humiliating it is to get there—to drag yourself before someone else's judgment, to admit plainly what you've done, to face their pain and feel it as your own, and to make yourself vulnerable to whatever judgment they wish to render. I mean, provided you knew and expected and accepted the worst possible judgment as a just and plausible outcome. So you take that feeling, ratchet it up to a cosmic scale, think of how often in our own lives we ghost or avoid or talk around our transgressions and wounds and trespasses, because that's easier than saying the words—yeah, given that particular theological framework, I could imagine someone nursing their wounds unto eternity.
Home by Marilynne Robinson is not about soteriology, not directly, though the characters, being all of a 1950s-Iowa-Protestant bent, do discuss the nature of salvation at length a few times. It is about forgiveness, though—and I don't think I've ever read another book that so keenly captures the pain and complexity of the thing.
At the novel's opening, the retired minister and widower Robert Boughton lives in a house that's too big for just him. His youngest daughter, 38 years old, has recently returned to serve as his live-in caretaker. Glory is a fine young woman, and Robert raised five other fine children to adulthood, most with families of their own, but who visit on the holidays and love their father deeply. It seems like Reverend Boughton should have little to regret—save Jack.
Jack, the prodigal seventh child, his eldest and most beloved, was not a fine child. Seemingly troubled from a young age, and despite all the love and care and affection everyone in the family could shower upon him, he seemed to go wayward no matter how he tried: "the loneliness none of them could ever forget, that wry distance, as if there were injury for him in the fact that all of them were native to their life as he never could be." He stole; he drank; he caused trouble for the family and with their neighbors; trouble in which the father, too doting, constantly interceded, to shield his son from its consequences.
(If the reader has read Gilead first, they already know about Jack's gravest transgression of all—and I do think you ought to read these novels in order, if you're going to read them at all. Much of Home's most powerful scenes rest on the tension between what we know versus what Jack isn't saying, and what we know versus what Reverend Boughton knows.)
Home opens when Jack sends a letter saying he'll be coming home to visit soon. Soon, after a twenty-something years' absence. Soon, with no explanation of where he's been in the interim. Last time anyone saw him, he was a twentysomething college dropout with a drinking problem. Last time he received a check from his father, a few years ago, it was money meant to pay for his train fare to his mother's funeral, and Jack cashed the check but stayed away from the funeral.
And yet, at the mention of Jack's return, Reverend Boughton's energy returns at once: he talks endlessly of how wonderful it will be to have Jack home; he tells all his friends that he'll be here "any day now"; he insists on stocking the fridge and pantry with every food he remembered Jack liking; he insists that Glory bake that one pie Jack always liked. All the while Glory waits in half-hope and half-dread, because, what if Jack doesn't come, what if he's flaking out yet again—it will break her father's heart.
Jack is a long time in coming. Long enough that the lettuce wilts in the fridge and the pies go bad. But he does, at last, appear.
And the rest of the book is... nothing much happening. Nothing much happening, but in an immanent, intimate way. Jack helps around the house. He tames the weeds in the garden; he fixes up a car in a shed on the property. He plays checkers with his father, or with Glory. Occasionally they listen to a baseball game together.
I had to put the book down several times due to secondhand—well, not secondhand embarrassment, really, that's not the word. The better word is secondhand agony, and though that feels overwrought I can't bring myself to temper it. It is horrible, in the deepest sense of the word, to have your father sit you down and say, I know what's troubling you. To have your father say, that thing you did—it's my fault. To have your father blame himself for your own cowardice and carelessness, to have him twist the story around to where he did wrong, where he was the one who failed you, where he could have fixed things if only he had loved better and more wisely. To have him say it over the dinner table with the candles lit and the atmosphere oddly formal, because he has clearly been thinking about this a while, this confession that is actually a contortion. I am cringing just typing this.
And in-between those agonized scenes, the nothing-much continues happening. It drags in parts, but it's hard for me to say whether that's a flaw, necessarily. Some degree of "nothing happening" is necessary for a novel like this to work, because half the point is how much these people, all three of them, don't say; all the things they cannot bear to talk about.
I thumbed through some Goodreads reviews after reading the book, and I am failing to find the exact review that said this, so I'm paraphrasing from memory the one sentence that startled me like a thunderbolt: "Jack's dad will never forgive him but Glory already has."
It's a reading that was so striking that it had me simultaneously wondering could that be true? it can't be, right? and oh, duh, obviously that's true; how did I miss it?
Because it is true that Reverend Boughton struggles with his forgiveness. He wants his forgiveness of Jack to be real and complete, of course. But those moments when he tries to take the blame himself—isn't that a way of avoiding forgiveness? refusing to stare straight-on at the wrong that's been done? And when he starts to lose his good sense, near the end of the novel—when he says some rather cold things to Jack—we are wondering, is that dementia speaking? or is that simply dementia removing his inhibitions, letting him say what's in his heart? and if that is what's in his heart, can we blame him? He is human as anyone. God knows he's tried.
But Glory—quiet, pious Glory, who would seem to be as different from Jack as is possible, Glory who reads her Bible every night, Glory the filial goody-two-shoes youngest sister—Glory's forgiveness is quiet, unassuming, and entire. And because she listens to Jack—listens even when he's not talking, sitting comfortably in his presence, without demand or expectation, day after day—she comes the closest to understanding him of anyone. And her forgiveness does not come from naiveté or obliviousness. We learn that Glory was hurt deeply by someone probably not too unlike Jack himself; Glory is acquainted the world's dark and imperfect contours.
But she forgives him anyway. Forgave him, that is, ages ago.
There is a moment, late in the novel, when Jack does something awful that could have ended in disaster. Glory is the only witness. And Glory, furious, thinks: "How resigned to Jack's inaccessible strangeness she must be to forgive him something so grave, forgive him entirely and almost immediately. They all did that, and he had understood why they did, and he laughed, and it had frightened him. She thought, I will not forgive him for an hour or two."
But every other sentence of the story shows us that Glory's forgiveness is not an act of resignation. That hour or two, all she can muster against the far greater power of her own love—that is what is human in her; the rest, divine.
ETA: oh yeah, i liveblogged some excerpts and stuff to tumblr as i was reading; take a peek!
"Wouldn't everyone simply choose to leave hell, in that case? Like, if I died and woke up in hell, pretty quick I'd be like... welp, I sure called that shot wrong. Guess I'd better repent."
I pointed out that repentance, in Christian thought, isn't just an acknowledgment of "well, Jesus was right after all." It entails a change of character, an act of submission: ye shall know them by their fruits.
He shrugged. "I mean. I'm still in hell. Repentance seems like the better alternative?"
I mean, yeah, sure seems that way! But the intuitive comparison that made sense to me, back when I was a Christian, was: have you ever done something wrong, and you knew you did something wrong, but you dragged and dragged your feet on making amends and apologizing, because the horribleness of standing face-to-face with the person you wronged felt impossibly painful, even worse than just choking down your own shame and getting on as best as possible? The people in hell feel that way, I imagine.
Anyone who's experienced an act of undeserved mercy knows the surprise and the sheer relief of the thing, I think. All the moreso if it's granted without fuss, without fanfare, plainly and automatically and wholly. But I think they also know how horrible and humiliating it is to get there—to drag yourself before someone else's judgment, to admit plainly what you've done, to face their pain and feel it as your own, and to make yourself vulnerable to whatever judgment they wish to render. I mean, provided you knew and expected and accepted the worst possible judgment as a just and plausible outcome. So you take that feeling, ratchet it up to a cosmic scale, think of how often in our own lives we ghost or avoid or talk around our transgressions and wounds and trespasses, because that's easier than saying the words—yeah, given that particular theological framework, I could imagine someone nursing their wounds unto eternity.
Home by Marilynne Robinson is not about soteriology, not directly, though the characters, being all of a 1950s-Iowa-Protestant bent, do discuss the nature of salvation at length a few times. It is about forgiveness, though—and I don't think I've ever read another book that so keenly captures the pain and complexity of the thing.
At the novel's opening, the retired minister and widower Robert Boughton lives in a house that's too big for just him. His youngest daughter, 38 years old, has recently returned to serve as his live-in caretaker. Glory is a fine young woman, and Robert raised five other fine children to adulthood, most with families of their own, but who visit on the holidays and love their father deeply. It seems like Reverend Boughton should have little to regret—save Jack.
Jack, the prodigal seventh child, his eldest and most beloved, was not a fine child. Seemingly troubled from a young age, and despite all the love and care and affection everyone in the family could shower upon him, he seemed to go wayward no matter how he tried: "the loneliness none of them could ever forget, that wry distance, as if there were injury for him in the fact that all of them were native to their life as he never could be." He stole; he drank; he caused trouble for the family and with their neighbors; trouble in which the father, too doting, constantly interceded, to shield his son from its consequences.
(If the reader has read Gilead first, they already know about Jack's gravest transgression of all—and I do think you ought to read these novels in order, if you're going to read them at all. Much of Home's most powerful scenes rest on the tension between what we know versus what Jack isn't saying, and what we know versus what Reverend Boughton knows.)
Home opens when Jack sends a letter saying he'll be coming home to visit soon. Soon, after a twenty-something years' absence. Soon, with no explanation of where he's been in the interim. Last time anyone saw him, he was a twentysomething college dropout with a drinking problem. Last time he received a check from his father, a few years ago, it was money meant to pay for his train fare to his mother's funeral, and Jack cashed the check but stayed away from the funeral.
And yet, at the mention of Jack's return, Reverend Boughton's energy returns at once: he talks endlessly of how wonderful it will be to have Jack home; he tells all his friends that he'll be here "any day now"; he insists on stocking the fridge and pantry with every food he remembered Jack liking; he insists that Glory bake that one pie Jack always liked. All the while Glory waits in half-hope and half-dread, because, what if Jack doesn't come, what if he's flaking out yet again—it will break her father's heart.
Jack is a long time in coming. Long enough that the lettuce wilts in the fridge and the pies go bad. But he does, at last, appear.
And the rest of the book is... nothing much happening. Nothing much happening, but in an immanent, intimate way. Jack helps around the house. He tames the weeds in the garden; he fixes up a car in a shed on the property. He plays checkers with his father, or with Glory. Occasionally they listen to a baseball game together.
I had to put the book down several times due to secondhand—well, not secondhand embarrassment, really, that's not the word. The better word is secondhand agony, and though that feels overwrought I can't bring myself to temper it. It is horrible, in the deepest sense of the word, to have your father sit you down and say, I know what's troubling you. To have your father say, that thing you did—it's my fault. To have your father blame himself for your own cowardice and carelessness, to have him twist the story around to where he did wrong, where he was the one who failed you, where he could have fixed things if only he had loved better and more wisely. To have him say it over the dinner table with the candles lit and the atmosphere oddly formal, because he has clearly been thinking about this a while, this confession that is actually a contortion. I am cringing just typing this.
And in-between those agonized scenes, the nothing-much continues happening. It drags in parts, but it's hard for me to say whether that's a flaw, necessarily. Some degree of "nothing happening" is necessary for a novel like this to work, because half the point is how much these people, all three of them, don't say; all the things they cannot bear to talk about.
I thumbed through some Goodreads reviews after reading the book, and I am failing to find the exact review that said this, so I'm paraphrasing from memory the one sentence that startled me like a thunderbolt: "Jack's dad will never forgive him but Glory already has."
It's a reading that was so striking that it had me simultaneously wondering could that be true? it can't be, right? and oh, duh, obviously that's true; how did I miss it?
Because it is true that Reverend Boughton struggles with his forgiveness. He wants his forgiveness of Jack to be real and complete, of course. But those moments when he tries to take the blame himself—isn't that a way of avoiding forgiveness? refusing to stare straight-on at the wrong that's been done? And when he starts to lose his good sense, near the end of the novel—when he says some rather cold things to Jack—we are wondering, is that dementia speaking? or is that simply dementia removing his inhibitions, letting him say what's in his heart? and if that is what's in his heart, can we blame him? He is human as anyone. God knows he's tried.
But Glory—quiet, pious Glory, who would seem to be as different from Jack as is possible, Glory who reads her Bible every night, Glory the filial goody-two-shoes youngest sister—Glory's forgiveness is quiet, unassuming, and entire. And because she listens to Jack—listens even when he's not talking, sitting comfortably in his presence, without demand or expectation, day after day—she comes the closest to understanding him of anyone. And her forgiveness does not come from naiveté or obliviousness. We learn that Glory was hurt deeply by someone probably not too unlike Jack himself; Glory is acquainted the world's dark and imperfect contours.
But she forgives him anyway. Forgave him, that is, ages ago.
There is a moment, late in the novel, when Jack does something awful that could have ended in disaster. Glory is the only witness. And Glory, furious, thinks: "How resigned to Jack's inaccessible strangeness she must be to forgive him something so grave, forgive him entirely and almost immediately. They all did that, and he had understood why they did, and he laughed, and it had frightened him. She thought, I will not forgive him for an hour or two."
But every other sentence of the story shows us that Glory's forgiveness is not an act of resignation. That hour or two, all she can muster against the far greater power of her own love—that is what is human in her; the rest, divine.
ETA: oh yeah, i liveblogged some excerpts and stuff to tumblr as i was reading; take a peek!
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