Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead – the fictional town, not to be confused with Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead – is basically a novelistic setting with which to explore the twin problems of Christian theodicy and the accident of God’s grace. The soul of mankind itself makes for pretty convenient stakes, but a novel cannot just be intellectual exegesis bandied back and forth between anonymous voices; it needs distinct characters to ground its ideas, to put human faces on eternal questions. Most writers would kill to come up with a character as well realized as John Ames in Gilead; Robinson simply decided to stay in town and flesh out three more indelible and unique characters: Jack Boughton, Glory Boughton, and Lila Dahl. Over Gilead, Home and Lila, Robinson provides an ever-shifting perspective on the same scene, the same people, and the same issues, moving back and forth in time in order to increase the dimensions of that small town, bring some new avenues of inquiry into the equation. Taken together, they’re something like an Iowan version of Monet’s Haystacks, though I suppose round these parts you’d call it Corn Stalks. But to take them as one long novel is to ignore how distinct they are, how each uses its own register and narrative mode to different ends, and plainly, how good each one is as a standalone novel. Anecdotally, no two people ever agree on which one of the Gilead novels is their favorite; each book has their own fierce partisans, some like one and dislike the others, some love ‘em all but have one that particularly and constitutionally meshes with them.1 They’re all the same but radically different, as if Robinson decided to eschew some parts of making a ‘new’ novel (changing the setting, inventing a new set of characters) in order to restlessly push herself in different directions: Gilead a close first person series of letters for posterity, Home a close third-person domestic drama, and Lila a foundling come in from the wilderness in plot and in style, a close third person that freewheels in time, speaking in the past, present, and to the future simultaneously.
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