Home by Marilynne Robinson

Fans of Marilynne Robinson's 1980 novel, Housekeeping, had to wait twenty-four years for the author's second novel. But what a book that was! Gilead, which richly deserved its Pulitzer Prize, is an exceptional rumination on family, faith, and mortality, and is the best fiction I have read in the past several years. Thus you can imagine my excitement when I heard that we would not have to wait another couple decades for Robinson's third novel. Instead, Home was scheduled for publication in the fall of 2008, after a mere four year interval. Even better, the plot summaries indicated the narrative would return to the city of Gilead, Iowa, and feature many of the same characters.

The dustjacket asserts that Home is an "entirely independent" work. I understand the urge to make this claim, as sequels are unlikely to attract those who did not read the first book. But I think it is misleading. While there is nothing in Home that strictly requires a prior reading of Gilead, the narrative is going to appear quite different to those who have read that book. How could it not? Gilead is a fictional autobiography, an effort by the dying Reverend John Ames to leave something behind for his young son, whose childhood will be largely fatherless once Ames' failing heart gives out. Much of the dramatic tension in that book is provided by the return of Jack Boughton, the son of Ames' best friend, fellow clergyman Robert Boughton (and Ames' namesake). Jack's departure twenty years earlier was under tumultuous circumstances, and his two decade absence was a source of continuing heartache for his father. Ames was understandably suspicious on his friend's behalf when Jack re-entered their lives, and the tensions posed by this situation challenge many of Ames' long-held convictions.

The narrative in Home covers much of the same ground, but this time from within the Boughton household. Jack's younger sister, Glory, has returned home to care for her ailing father, and to hide from the failures in her own life:

"Home to stay, Glory! Yes" her father said, and her heart sank. He attempted a twinkle of joy at this thought, but his eyes were damp with commiseration. "To stay for a while this time! " he amended, and took her bag from her, first shifting his cane to his weaker hand. Dear God, she thought, dear God in heaven. So began and ended all her prayers these days, which were really cries of amazement. How could her father be so frail?

Glory, of course, has mixed feelings about the possible return of her brother. As the youngest child, she was a witness to the tragic circumstances under which Jack left twenty years earlier, as well as the effect it had on her parents. She knows how much pain Jack's absence has caused her father, but recognizes that his homecoming is as likely to reignite and deepen this suffering as it is to alleviate it. Thus she waits with bated breath as her father opens a letter from Jack, the first contact in many years:

She thought he might be waiting for her to leave the room, and yet she was afraid to leave. He might be disappointed, or the note might really be from Jack, but upsetting somehow, written from a ward for the chronically vexatious, the terminally remiss. From jail, for heaven's sake. He had better have a good reason for rousing these overwhelming emotions in his father. He had better have a good excuse or exposing the old man to the possibility of inexpressible disappointment. Even if he was dead.

I find it difficult to view this book as "entirely independent" of Gilead. I think it actually quite important to have read that book first. What Gilead depicts, via Reverend Ames, is a life that is fundamentally at peace with itself. Ames' character is marked by a humble confidence grounded in his faith. There are tensions, and doubts, and challenges, but they do not overthrow Ames' core of spirituality, and his narration shows it. Home, by contrast, is riddled with anxiety. Jack is in large part defined by his lack of faith, by the lonely restlessness that this causes in such a religious home, by the distance this puts between Jack and his family, especially his father. For Jack, moments of comfort and certainty are the rare exception. He is the perpetual outsider, largely unable to cope with the stresses of life. And the stresses of Jack's adult life are significant, as readers of Gilead understand by the end of that book (another reason Home will read so differently for those unfamiliar with the earlier work):

He realized he did not please his father, did not know how to please his father. He would probably have liked to believe he had done something wrong so that he could at least orient himself a little, but she had told him a terrible thing, that he had done nothing to offend, that his father had found fault with him anyway, only because he was old and sad now, not the father he thought he had come home to.

One reason I consider Gilead to be such an exceptional novel is that spirituality is an exceptionally difficult concept to satisfactorily integrate into modern fiction, yet Robinson does so with extraordinary force. In Home, she has similar success with Jack's existential discomfort, yet it feels like a less singular accomplishment. The roster of great existential novels is, after all, much deeper. Still, Home is in many ways the necessary complement to its predecessor. Just as a prior reading of Gilead is essential to a proper understanding of Home, spending several hundred pages inside the Boughton home will alter the way readers of Gilead view that masterpiece. For the better.