Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Gilead is a poignant novel of small town American life. There’s a lot of homespun wisdom and quaint prairie lore. It’s quite picturesque.
The fiery radical abolitionist grandfather was my favorite. By the time of the novel, he’s faded to legend. And it’s a legend that really only the narrator remembers. (There’s a lot of the town’s history that only the narrator remembers.) But his exploits during the Civil War and his prophetic insanity were well done.
I do wish that Jack Boughton’s importance to the plot was apparent earlier on. That’s a hard question, though, because the novel sticks very, very close to its framing device. That is to say, it purports to be a long letter from an old preacher to his very young son. And the preacher couldn’t have known the plot when he started writing. The author couldn’t have guided our attention any better without also sacrificing verisimilitude. It’s probably one of the unsolvable problems of fiction.
I love that we, the readers, can tell what Lila is saying by which old sermon she digs up to show the narrator. But the narrator never gets it. “Hmm, funny how the advice I gave my congregation twenty years ago is exactly what I need to hear right now. Curious. Honey, would you pass the orange juice?”
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