Reading List: Gilead - Marilynne Robinson

Hello readers and welcome back to another installment of the Reading List. As mentioned previously I am trying to work in more BIPOC and female authors onto this list. To that end I decided to go with a contemporary female author and one who is pretty well known by now: Marilynne Robinson and her 2004 Pulitzer winner Gilead.

This book was an outstanding read for many reasons (and was a delectable palate cleanser from The Bourne Identity), not least of which would be Robinson’s incredible and deft use of language and imagery to tell a quiet story about generations of a family.

On the face of it this novel is epistolary, or told in the form of a long letter from a father to a son. The father John Ames has been a preacher in the town of Gilead for many years; however his own father decamped for warmer climates. John’s grandfather was an activist during the Civil War and moved out to Kansas to fight for abolition. He eventually came back after the war but left for Kansas again at the end of his life, leading to a moving passage in which John and his own father travel there to find his gravesite. I enjoyed this part of the novel especially. Later we see more scenes contemporary to the book’s time period (1956) and we learn about John’s friendship with a man and preacher named Boughton. Here John's faith is tested when Boughton's son returns to Gilead, and we learn the long backstory in which Boughton’s son (also named John, or Jack in the novel) has fathered a child out of wedlock early in his life and since abandoned it. We later learn the child dies. Some of the most riveting parts of the novel are the preacher John’s wrestling in his own faith and anger over this. He then learns that young Jack has a new family of his own in Tennessee and decides to give him his blessing as Jack decides to head back out to be with them.

As stated, this was a remarkable book for many reasons and I can definitely see why it won one of the most prestigious awards in the world of letters. The imagery is quite compelling and astounding, whether that’s of a memory of a boy taking a charred biscuit from his father during a church demolition or a small town in Iowa and its trees and flowers. And I feel I must touch on this: while I consider myself a nonbeliever the prose, despite wrapping around Christian and Calvinist doctrine for most of the book, was so well written that I didn’t mind and actually enjoyed it. So there’s that.

I would definitely recommend this book for anyone looking for a master class in how to tell a phenomenal story, made even more interesting for me knowing now some of the characters are based on real people. There are no chapter breaks but it is broken down by scene so there are plenty of places to take a break when you need it. Thanks for joining me on this reading adventure.