There’s a cliché about Marilynne Robinson’s work that nothing much happens in it. Yet, critics are fond of saying, in the absence of action beautifully ruminative prose and memorable characterization more than suffice. This is true of Robinson’s latest book, Home, a finalist for the National Book Award. Indeed, the spare plot seems to be the least of the book’s concerns: a broken-down, black sheep of a son comes home, converses some with his spinster sister, his ailing father, and his father’s friends, reveals some of his sins and secrets, then leaves.
Yet the absence of plot is significant. In Home, plot is what we must get over to get to the meat of the novel. The insufficiency of human action, an insufficiency the characters struggle to accept, is the kernel of Robinson’s theology expressed in literary form. It is what makes her novel important for our time.
Home is a companion novel to Robinson’s 2005 Pulitzer-Prize-winning Gilead. Like its partner, Home takes place in the mid-1950s in the small town of Gilead, Iowa. While Gilead presents the memoirs and musings of John Ames, an aging Congregationalist minister, Home focuses on Ames’s namesake, the son of Ames’ best friend and colleague Robert Boughton. Jack, as John Ames Boughton is called, has been both the most loved and the most destructive member of his minister-father’s large brood. Despite the love and attention of his family, Jack gets into trouble again and again, finally fathering a child with a poor young woman from the town. He then abandons her and the child, who dies early. After some 20 years wasted in prison and drinking, he returns.
Whereas Gilead became famous by introducing us to the voice of John Ames in his writings to his son, Home explores the mind and perspective of Glory, Jack’s little sister. Glory, too, has returned to Gilead and cares for her dying father with a clear view of the agony of her black-sheep brother and those he has hurt—and a clearing view of her own spiritual struggles.
The world of Home and Gilead is changing technologically and socially. It is a world in which the old verities and kindnesses of home and faith are less certain than they may have been formerly. Television reaches Gilead, and though town members tell Glory that “many of the older folks find television a great comfort,” it doesn’t seem to be so for the Boughton household, whose members are brought into conflict over seeing racial violence in Montgomery, Alabama on it.
Over the course of the two novels, we watch the diminishing strength of the best friends and colleagues John Ames and Robert Boughton. Their failing health and mental/theological capacities are poignant in part because of the less-ardent energies of those following behind. For example, Glory’s piety is primarily filial in origin and her devotions seem quaint. The novel tells us “faith for her was habit and family loyalty, a reverence for the Bible which was also literary, admiration for her mother and father.”
The main questions of Home—how can we be saved from the weight of our sins? In what may we hope?—are brought to life so vividly in Jack that they seem to bring new urgency to Glory’s habitual belief. Jack believes that he is predestined for perdition. Not only the consequences of his sins deny him hope, but also the bloody and long-standing sins perpetrated by his country. These include the sins of racial discrimination and violence especially, which prevent him from legally marrying his black wife and legitimizing his mixed-race son.
Because Home shares its narrative world and much of its meager plot with Gilead, readers familiar with the latter may know before beginning to read the way things turn out for most of the characters. As a result, the novel’s tension does not emerge from curiosity about the end, but rather from our struggle to accept it. The reader wants to save Jack’s soul. We, like Jack, Glory and Old Boughton, have to slowly and painfully give up hope for what we want to happen. Like Old Boughton, we have to “stop tormenting” ourselves “with the thought that [we] can do anything about—anything.”
The only glimmer of hope we have comes from John Ames’s wife, a quiet woman who married Ames late, giving him a son in his old age. Lila gathers her courage at the climax of the book to insist that salvation is possible, though mysterious. She tells Jack, “A person can change. Everything can change.” The narrative clearly highlights the importance of the moment by being shocked out of its third-person, limited perspective on Glory into third-person omniscience, registering the wonder of Ames and Boughton. However, the narrative doesn’t explain how things can change, or whether they will.
Home uses its slow pace of narrative rumination as a theological counterargument to human desires that seek to have our own invented plots and technologies take the place of divine providence. All of Robinson’s books are formal challenges to the contemporary pace of reading. If readers want insights that are no longer than a text-message, with easily discernible morals and perfect resolutions, they will find themselves frustrated with Home. Reading Home, though, through the frustration, is a deeply necessary lesson in contemplation.
Home is also a response to modern and present-day beliefs about progress, works gospels, and bootstraps politics—a negative response she has sounded in all her works. Perhaps Robinson didn’t foresee the rhetorical and legislative frenzy of responses to the financial downturn. But even if she didn’t, this book marks another approach, one less enamored with or optimistic about the powers and abilities of humans to enact change. Readers heady and invigorated by the chant of “yes we can” may be helpfully countered and balanced in their thinking by Robinson’s quiet, but insistent “No, we can’t.”
Of course, we are to love, forgive, recognize and respond to the sorrows of our neighbors as we can—and the novel has ample evidence of that. While Home shows strong interest in Jack, by the end of the novel Glory has become a significant thematic focus. This happens as she realizes that her tasks are not to be calculated attempts at change but rather resignation and preservation. This includes the keeping of all the household objects that stand as mementos of God’s grace. Her realization, accomplished while ruminating on the porch, allows her to recognize the work of providence and glory in it, tasks well worth a human life.
The lines and life in Home give us plenty of space for that kind of rumination and realization. And if preservation is not the whole of the cultural mandate, it’s a good half of it, a half that puts us more in mind of God’s providence than our own cultivating.
Tiffany Eberle Kriner is Assistant Professor of English at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois.
