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MAPPING THE LOST HEARTLAND: A Review of Marilynne Robinson's "Gilead"
by Ian Chang
February 2005
Toward the end of the past election season, it became fashionable to imagine that the electorate was choosing between belief and empiricism, or faith and reason, or even theocracy and secularism. To be sure, the incumbent's religious conversion seemed to operate in him as a kind of unshakable moral confidence. He and his apostles offered critics a crusader's zeal, immune to contrary evidence or ill results and intolerant of doubt, complication, or dissent. And as we know, his followers seemed to buy that zeal. Confidence has a powerful allure. To cast the recent phase of the American experiment, however, as a grudge match between the “faith-based community” and the “reality-based community,” gives a bad name to people of faith everywhere, not to mention people of reality. Surely not all or even most Christians see George Bush as the carrier of God's banner. What other devout president would accept, much less encourage, the view that he has, at long last, brought the Lord Himself into the White House? Surely also there are non-Christians who cherish some of the unmistakably Judeo-Christian moral principles that have long buttressed our polity. Any casual reader of the Declaration of Independence could tell you that the federal posture toward religion (more precisely, Christianity) has been complex from the beginning, as with all the Enlightenment's progeny. The simple syntax of that first clause in the First Amendment limns one of the most elegantly clear and utterly confounding laws since Moses came down from the mountain. To be sure, the separation of church and state is set in the bedrock of the Union, but our revolutionary birth might fairly be construed as the original “faith-based initiative,” and it certainly must have seemed so to the prim and pious Puritans whose very persecution required that separation. Those seeking an antidote to the mutual-exclusivity theory of religion and reason—or at least a more rigorous exploration of the moral leverage that religious principles can offer mere mortals in a complicated world—would do well to turn away from the cable networks and toward the recent Big Literature offerings at the local bookstore. The most pointed of these, and the most Christian, is surely Marilynne Robinson's long awaited Gilead.
Robinson's previous novel, the exquisite debut Housekeeping, was published nearly twenty-five years ago, and the new book is being welcomed with considerable relief, in that Housekeeping no longer threatens to be the one and only fiction produced by her extraordinary mind. The new novel confirms Robinson's depth of vision, though it doesn't quite have the dead-eyed aim of its predecessor; if Housekeeping was born of pure talent, Gilead bespeaks an equal measure of hard work—twenty years' worth, maybe. It is set in the fictional town of Gilead, Iowa in 1956, and it takes the form of a letter written by a senescent Iowa preacher, John Ames, to his young son, with the aim of leaving the boy an account of his “begats” once his father is gone. Those begats, as patrilineal as a Biblical genealogy, begin with Ames's grandfather, a fierce and Faulknerian veteran of the militant abolitionist movement, then pass to Ames's father, a passionate pacifist whose rejection of his father's bloody methods makes for an uneasy legacy. Ames's own story is one of desolation assuaged at the eleventh hour; he loses a young wife and child early in life, then lives in painful solitude until well into his sixties, when he gains a new young wife and child in an utterly disarming flurry of puppy love. Ames's terminal content, however, and the equanimity of his project, are soon disturbed by the reappearance of his godson and namesake, John Ames Boughton, the wayward son of his best friend and fellow preacher, known simply as “old Boughton.” Jack, as the son is called, is an antagonist in every sense, wreaking havoc with the emotional lives of those Ames loves most—and receiving wholly inadequate recompense for it, in Ames's quietly seething opinion. Ames's urgent final reflections, and their well-earned conclusion, propose a modern Christianity more like that of the Founding Fathers than that of our current leader, a Protestant Christianity that remembers the radical project of the Reformation, and most of all, a devout Christianity that requires, rather than implacable certainty, a rigorous and relentless questioning of self and society.
The role of prophet is an unlikely one for Marilynne Robinson, because as a thinker and writer, her methodology has not been essentially forward-looking. Her tradition is of the various Protestant idealists who “burned over” the Northeast and then, in the great Abolitionist grab for land and hearts and minds, settled the Midwest and further. She grew up in their religious legacy in remotest Idaho, relatively apart from the cultural upheavals of her generation. Her touchstones, both literary and moral, are Biblical. Her theological concerns are rooted hundreds of years ago, in Europe. Her natural intellectual habitat, therefore, is a dwindling landscape on the American scene, elbowed out of existence by modernist thought like a prairie eaten by strip malls.
For all these reasons, there is a tendency in those who write about Robinson to paint her as a sort of eccentric throwback, especially in light of her self-professed reclusive tendencies. (She remains famously unplugged, owning no television.) I reject that rather condescending portrayal, in part because as a student of hers at the University of Iowa, I have seen firsthand her engagement with current affairs and living humans, but more importantly because her involvement in today's world—natural, political, artistic—is everywhere in her books. In her essays, collected in The Death of Adam, her preference for attitudes of the past is predicated on a deep familiarity with those of the present. Would that her critics knew their history as well as she knows current trends. Robinson has been deeply polemical and occasionally shrill, certainly, in her non-fiction, as befits an heir to the radical reformist tradition. But through the compound eye of fiction, her humane cause blossoms into a conflicted and contemporary appraisal of aesthetics, ethics, and of course, theology. If she rejects modernity, it is because modernity is so pleased with itself, and being pleased with yourself, in Robinson's world, is a dangerous way to be.
Robinson's novels turn this ethic of reconsideration into a literary strategy as well. They start from a rather conventional state of calm, or at least poise, and proceed to re-evaluate and revise that state until a more elevated, more moral—one might say more beautiful—position has been achieved. Both novels begin with a writerly flourish, then seem to amble along for a spell, with a certain coyness. Housekeeping follows Ruth and Lucille, sisters growing up in the Mountain West under the eccentric supervision of their drifter aunt (and the long shadow of their mother's suicide), and its opening is a loose allusion to Melville, one of Robinson's literary heroes. The allusion converts “Call me Ishmael” into “My name is Ruth,” and Ishmael's marine wanderlust into Ruth's grandfather's personal expansion via rail. From there, we get a telling of Ruth's family history, which, given its revolving tragedies, seems surprisingly lighthearted and a little practiced. Ruth's grandmother didn't die, she “eschewed awakening.” The prose is clean and poised, elegant but slightly stiff. Great-aunts enter, providing even more direct comic relief. Then, when Aunt Sylvie finally arrives to take care of the girls, the real work begins. Ruth begins the trademark Robinsonian introspection, the kind of thinking that connects the concrete facts of character and situation with the glue of probing, urgent metaphysical concern. Ruth's careful narrative style slowly takes on tectonic power, culminating in one of the most resonant rites of passage in all of American letters (via a figure that by any standard of metaphor should not work at all—an actual bridge) and an aria for the dead masquerading as a thematic reflection on water. By the end of the book, its power and scope requires recalculation by an order of magnitude. A charming coming of age story for girls becomes a booming, symphonic expression of the American urge to wander and the lasting beauty of sorrow. Gilead has much the same motion. It begins with another homage, this time to Faulkner: a complete dialogue, deceptively simple and heavily portentous, within a single sentence. This style is not natural for Robinson, and it quickly falls away, becoming more conversational. Gilead 's writing lacks some of the economy, and much of the moody and sinister darkness, that Housekeeping displayed, but this is partly the result of the narrator's more explicit narration: he is actually writing this down, and for a child, at that. Ames's epistolary tone is mostly informal, sunny, and firm—the comforting voice of a country preacher. He is an old man, and can hardly be faulted for repeating himself, losing his train of thought, drifting into extended tangents. His recounting of his own familial and spiritual development is sweet, even saccharine. He eagerly embraces even his regrets, the long dark night of his loneliness. His favorite commentary on his own observations is that they are “remarkable to consider.” The stylistic effect, for a time, is of a kind of Oprah-style old-gent's-lessons-before-dying, punctuated with charming anecdotes of family and Civil War history, full of colorful characters. As with all of Robinson's writing, Gilead is lively and richly amusing, almost laugh-out-loud funny at times. But its beginning has a meandering, occasionally cloying quality, like Whitman at his slackest.
Soon enough, though, having lulled you into complacency (or perhaps boredom), the book pounces. The fulcrum on which the book turns is Jack Boughton's return to Gilead. Jack is a character fitting the Faulknerian ambition of the novel, bringing to mind the antihero of Faulkner's Light in August, Joe Christmas, in that, like Christmas, he's a pitiable case, a wanderer whose viciousness springs from an almost existential self-loathing. Jack is nearly Ames's own, having been named after Ames by old Boughton in a heartfelt but misplaced effort to replace Ames's lost child. But Jack is the opposite of the cautious, meticulously ethical Ames, and his godfather, ostensibly charged with Jack's spiritual development, can do little but bitterly throw up his hands. Old Boughton, in contrast, embraces Jack without reservation. Jack is quite completely the Prodigal Son, which needles Ames as much as the Bible story needles nearly every earnest Christian who wishes to make sense of it.
We learn Jack's dark history slowly, as a result of Ames's gentlemanly discretion. His desire to judge Jack unfavorably is palpable, but his Christian forbearance won't allow it, and his fear of Jack reaches a fever pitch. As a child, we are told, Jack was an imp, full of dirty tricks and petty crimes. As a young man, he was a full-fledged rogue, culminating in a sordid sexual episode whose consequences he flees, bringing grief and dishonor to his family (and to Ames, on their behalf). As a middle-aged man, Jack returns to Gilead, apparently to be with his dying father, with a changed mien, almost as if seeking redemption. If his presence fills Ames with unease, his ingratiation into Ames's family, where he makes a pretty picture with Ames's young wife and boy, afflicts Ames with what might be called sexual paranoia, in a less even-tempered man.
This threat to Ames's sense of the rightness of the world is a thorn in his theology, his emotional stability, and his fragile health, and it provokes in him a startling meanness. An odd reversal occurs as he tries to make sense of it all, where Ames begins to seem the villain, Jack the victim. Jack's true motives are finally revealed, and Ames becomes his grudging confidant, whereupon the moral landscape of Ames's Gilead is feverishly redrawn, its racial and religious harmony far more threatened, and perhaps more threatening, than we were led to believe. And of course, Ames's formidable and erudite mind does indeed produce insights—and shows him to have been doing so all along—that are remarkable to consider. The book's writing, too, succumbs to fever; it no longer moseys, but careens. Robinson's restless theology is manifest in her literary practice; like her protagonists, her novels question themselves into life, think themselves to epic proportions. Ulysses Grant, the book informs us twice, once called Iowa “the shining star of radicalism.” Given its recent voting performance and the generally rightward shift of the upper Midwest, it's hard not to see Robinson's emphasis on that past as bitter recrimination. The novel treats with loving regard the radicals of the abolitionist movement, like Ames's grandfather. (Ames's father recalls the night John Brown and his band hid out in his father's church, leaving him a bloody mess to clean.) Ames's affectionate treatment of his grandfather suggests a belief that the violent zeal of past progressives, in the Civil War and before, made possible the subsequent balm in Gilead. At the same time, the complacency of the townsfolk after the war represents a failure of the idealism of that hopeful and devastating conflict.
The book doesn't quite give religiously inspired violence the old ends-justify-the-means pass, however. The War Between the States devastates Gilead; the picture Robinson offers of those that remain, shell-shocked and bereft by the war, is pitiful. After the war, when Ames's grandfather preaches to the ruins of his congregation about the “divine righteousness” of their cause, Ames's father cannot bear it and betrays him, philosophically, as only a son can. Ames himself feels a powerful obligation to reconcile the activism of his grandfather and the pacifism of his father (and, it's worth noting, the principled atheism of his much older brother Edward), as a legacy to his son. Ultimately, in the novel, the ethical focus is not on a fixed notion of right conduct, nor on how we fall short of it, but on the drama and beauty of the struggle toward it. We are presented with very concrete manifestations of Ames's interrogation of sin and virtue. His barbed banter with Jack on the subject of that blind alley of Calvinism, predestination, reads like a Beckettian dialogue between Everyman and Satan, full of jokey avoidance and the limits of language. But its impact, as in Beckett, is entirely human, and entirely painful; what Ames sees as an irritating skeptic's game, Jack feels as his last hope to avoid nihilism.
Through his own struggle to understand, and ultimately to love Jack Boughton, Ames ends up at a sort of reconciliation, a peace with qualifications. Much earlier in his recollections, Ames says of blessing that it “doesn't enhance sacredness, but … acknowledges it. The sensation is of really knowing a creature, I mean really feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time.” His reconciliation with Jack is just such a blessing: an appreciation of the mystery of the world, rather than a solution for it. Therein lies the source of the novel's satisfaction, and its most beautiful aesthetic. Ames advises his son:
If you confront insult or antagonism, your first impulse will be to respond in kind. But if you think, as it were, This is an emissary sent from the Lord, and some benefit is intended for me, first of all the occasion to demonstrate my faithfulness, the chance to show that I do in some small degree participate in the grace that saved me, you are free to act otherwise than as circumstances would seem to dictate. You are free to act by your own lights. You are freed at the same time of the impulse to hate or resent that person. He would probably laugh at the thought that the Lord sent him to you for your benefit (and his), but that is the perfection of the disguise, his own ignorance of it.
Theologians have long tackled the so-called “problem of evil,” and Gilead does too, in the person of Jack. The suggestion, on nearly every page, is that evil (even the mild version of it Ames briefly displays) results from an inadequate acceptance of the value in mere existence, an inability to see beauty everywhere, even in your worst enemy. Jack's transgressions, from the trivial pranks to the harshest abandonments, seem to be the direct result of his weak faith in the value of living in the world. He is deeply sensitive but hopelessly blind. He misunderstands his own pain and bound thereby to create pain for others. The novel seeks to remind us of the revolutionary (and counterintuitive) quality of the Judeo-Christian ethics, which insisted, in contrast to most of the rest of the bloodthirsty and hierarchical ancient world, that all of creation is sacred, despite what it does to us, and that justice is God's to enforce, not ours.
Robinson's genius is in her masterful interweaving of these ideas into a compelling personal story, making coherence of philosophy from coherence of character. Though her palette is entirely Christian, her portrait of Ames has enough pathos and warmth to move even the most committed atheist. Make no mistake, though; Gilead's appeal derives directly from its Christian theology: Robinson's faith is a lens for viewing the world on any scale, and its fullest expression is in her fiction. Where Housekeeping turned Biblical interpretation into a personal credo, Gilead makes it into a full-fledged politics. Ames's health is in steep decline, making his last testament an urgent endeavor to him. But, as we begin to see in the racial climate of Gilead, both Ames's culture and its salutary influence on his country, are also in steep decline, making his testament an urgent endeavor to us. His life becomes a kind of living theology, a quiet echo of the living theology offered to Ames by the life of Christ.
So deeply humanist is Ames, he tips his hat even to some of those he believes are responsible for dismantling his theological tradition. Ludwig Feuerbach is a touchstone of his scholarly exploration, an adversary worthy enough to recommend to others in doubt, including Jack. In fact, Ames relishes serious dissent from Christian doctrine as an opportunity to test his understanding of the faith. In this same way, Ames is entirely reality-based; he knows he lives in a backwater, but he's no rube. His goal is a faith that does not reject facts, but encompasses them. When the empirical challenges his faith, as Jack does, Ames sees it as a flaw in his conception of that faith, one that God, well, wishes to correct. The correction is a torturous process, and Ames suffers mightily under it, not only because he fears Jack, but because he fears death, the ultimate new fact he must reconcile. Belief, in the novel, hardly makes one's life easier, only more worthwhile.
Ames demands that his personal suffering be understood as a lesson from God in the same way he believes episodes of national suffering—the Depression, the World Wars, the flu epidemic, the Cold War threat of nuclear annihilation—are, for lack of a better word, signs. It may be a tall order to ask that we accept Osama bin Laden as an emissary from God, but that is the unavoidable implication of Ames's worldview. The discomfiting idea that God tests us with heartbreak flummoxes even Ames, however. He admits at least partial failure more than once in trying to square God's teachings with God's means, in terms of cruel episodes both in his life and in the Bible. Nonetheless, Ames would surely be disheartened to see how few American leaders, even among the clergy, were willing to see 9/11 as an opportunity to reform ourselves, rather than burn our freedoms as pagan sacrifice.
Ames's broader application of his personal experience is, again, emblematic of the novel's entire approach. Robinson's writing can be eerily fractal, showing the same principle at work in an infinite range of scale. Her intellect is agile to the point of incredulity, and concise to boot. The smallest detail is not safe from it. In Housekeeping, a sip of water becomes an ocean in microcosm, and both become a vessel for the endless cycle of human suffering and forgetting, linking the experience of Ruth and her sister Lucille (with their drowned mother and grandfather) to the experience of Noah in the Flood. In a brief tangent in Ames's history of Gilead, we see a rural legend about an unsolved murder turn into a deft explication of the economic costs of violence. Robinson's appreciation for image gives her a metaphoric range worthy of Whitman, but her tight control of her prose keeps the metaphors both emotionally grounded and aesthetically elegant. (To wit: Ames's realization that the Earth moves in a spiral, or his observation that the light of the sun is constant, and “we just turn over in it.”) Gilead, like Housekeeping, refuses to honor artificial boundaries between image and thought, or between word and being, to profoundly moving effect. This too, seems a feature of Robinson's Christian project of re-invention.
The religious flavor of Robinson's novels is perhaps most evident in her application of restoration, of Revelation, as a dialectic. For Ames, as for Ruth, the Apocalypse (and its extemporal waiting room, the afterlife) will be the ultimate return, a healing of the flawed world. It will return Ames to his family and Ruth to hers. It will salve Jack Boughton's wounds, and Iowa's. But Robinson convincingly uses the idea not as an idealist fantasy (or worse, as a prejudicial excuse), but instead as an extension of truths obvious to her characters in their lifetimes, proved not by observation but by analogy, and requiring a receptivity akin to but not the same as seeing. Not that her characters believe they can imagine the existence beyond. Ames offers an elegant clarification of this eschatology, comparing the relation of this world and the next with the relation of a stone to a dream; both can be said to exist, but they are so radically different as to be incomparable. Even this analogy, though, is an act of imagination. In Robinson's work, imagination is the ultimate arbiter of truth, imagination which itself is only a metaphor, an image, for God's creative force. It amounts to a kind of rebuke of literalism: blessings, even communion, require only the fertile ground of a receptive consciousness to bloom. (Among the most beautiful recurring scenes in the book is Ames's eating of a biscuit in the rain, from the hand of his father, as they help tear down a burned-out church. Ames's transubstantiative mind turns it into nothing less than true communion.) The power of restoration is fully instantiated in Robinson's world, and it's enough to give her characters, and surely some of her readers, considerable faith in ours.
Robinson's web of connections seems to catch Ames by surprise as much as it does the reader. The innocence of the beginning of Ames's narration starts to seem like a prerequisite for the revelations of its conclusion. Impending death has a notorious way of clarifying things, and it forces Ames to a point of considerable honesty with himself, about his anger, his sorrow, and his sins. Redemption, when it comes for Ames, comes with an acceptance of grace, a willingness to see grace, a love of love. Moreover, that acceptance comes only when he lets go of his certainty, when he lets go of his comforts, including those tightly held “moral values.”
But Ames knows he's dying; for us, it's not yet clear. As applied to our current situation, Robinson's prophecy is restorative, but her call is judgmental. Ames describes Iowa's shining star, like that of Creation, as a darkened ember (back in 1956), awaiting the breath of God to inflame it once more. That promise hardly lets us off the hook, though, since fifty years later we still seem to be in danger of turning to ash.
Ian Chang lives in Los Angeles.
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