Thoughts on Marilynne Robinson's Home : Boughton family forms and rituals

Of the Boughton children, novelist Marilynne Robinson writes, "Even as children they had been good in fact, but also in order to be seen as good"(6). When they return for holidays, the children gather together at the dining room table and read the Bible aloud. This behavior, "like many of their obligations and many of their pleasures...was, whatever else, a performance meant to please their father, to assure him that they loved the old life, that they had received all the good he had intended for them"(101). Glory admits "to please him was so potent a motive that it displaced motives of her own"(101).

As an adult, Glory comes to realize that their home was a stage dedicated to their father's vision. Perhaps in part, this is why Gilead often now feel like a place of exile to the grown-up Boughton children. In a moment of frustration, Glory complains, "Oh, not to know every stump and stone, not to remember how the fields of Queen Anne's lace figured in the childish happiness they had offered to their father's hopes, God bless him"(282).

Springing from his faith, Boughton's ideals and hopes are threatened by the world: "experience had taught [Boughton and his wife] that truth had sharp edges and hard corners, and could be seriously at odds with kindness"(17). He loyally clings to his belief inspired vision of the world, while realizining it doesn't always answer the reality he encounters.

At times, this stance gives a forced quality to his attempts to live out that belief. There are times when it seems that experience has hollowed out the conviction of his belief and yet, out of a prideful desire to appear consistent, he persists in a show of that belief. When he first hears of Jack's desire to return, his response is to "set aside grievances and doubts...[and seek] footing in the general blessedness of his life for a posture of heroic and fatherly grace"(24). Sensing this, with the apparent exception of Jack, his children tread cautiously when it comes to questioning his belief. Glory reminds Jack: "'we're beyond the point where we can raise questions about his theology...If I pointed out a contradiction in his thinking, I would probably upset him. He's gotten touchy about that kind of thing"(154).

Resting on a shaky foundation, Boughton's belief needs a high degree of seconding by the world; for God to be there and be good, the world must conform to a level of order and goodness. His children feel an obligation to act in accord with these general expectations. Exposing these expectations, Jack half-jokingly warns his father, "I really don't think the Lord's good name should depend on my behavior"(274).

For Boughton, the Lord's good name is dependent on his children presenting a happy front. Anger and sadness are frowned upon in the Boughton home. These emotions threaten their father's conception of himself and his family, his creation. Even as an adult returned home, Glory "was wary of certain thoughts, certain memories, because her father could not bear her unhappiness....she did no permit herself to brood....It would make him miserable"(16). In addition to sadness, she has been trained to suppress anger and disappointment. When Jack attempts suicide, Robinson almost comically notes how Glory "was almost disappointed that she couldn't be angry at him"(249). The qualifying adverb here suggests the extent to which Glory's been taught to suppress negative feelings and thoughts. This reflects Boughton. A belief in a good God will not brook too much disappointment in his creation.

Since what he encounters often does contradict his sunny belief, Boughton is always attempting to square events with his beliefs. Faced with suffering and injustice in a world made by a good God, Boughton has concluded with Paul that all are sinners and all deserve to suffer. The fact that some suffer and seem punished while others seem to escape punishment troubles Jack but not his father. As he sees it, the suffering of some simply points to the working of Justice. Those who escape this suffering do so thanks to a mercifully granted grace. So he squares reality.

Yet, Jack's situation brings all these issues close to home and causes Boughton pain and confusion; he understands Jack's suffering but not his inability to gain any mercy. This is part and parcel of his failure to make sense of Jack in a more general sense. How could he be who he is; how could his blessed and loved family produce such an estranged person? Given his upbringing in a minister's home, how to explain Jack's lack of belief which persists despite Jack's own seeming desire and effort to believe? Where's God in this outcome?

Faced with these questions, Boughton tends to stick with his belief at the expense of his experience. Rather than see and know Jack, to the extent he can, he ignores and believes Jack can be gathered, he can and will eventually be a Teddy.

Jack presents a mirror image of his father's habit in this regard. Because his life has never made much sense to him or squared with Christian belief, he has decided to keep his experience and jettisons belief. His life and the world lead him to see life as a puzzle at best, a cruel and irrational thing. A key moment comes when he lucidly tells Glory how the world feels to him and she cries. As if her father were in the room, she apologizes, "I get tears. I can't help it. They don't mean anything." She's lying. Jack corrects her, "They're nice , actually, To be honest, I think I tell you my sad stories to see if they really are sad. And, sure enough, the tears start, and I can relax about it. I mean, there's nothing sad about getting what you deserve. So I've been told. I feel a little vindication when you cry"(276). Jack often claims that he suffers justly. Yet, deep down, his profession of sadness points to his feeling his life is an example of injustice. Glory is able to comfort Jack, not by making sense of his misery or excusing his misdeeds, but by sharing in his conviction that both are senseless.

The Reverend is given to blinders. As Ames suggests in a more pronounced fashion in Gilead, living in Gilead could easily become a form of escape for a Christian; this is a small, quiet and homogenous town. Yet,
Boughton hardly seems at peace, nor does it appear that he is aging gracefully. He is tetchy and irritable, host to all sorts of grievances which he covers over with a forgiving and gentle manner. Inevitably, these grievances come to the surface, "the decorous turmoil of his soul...erupt[s]"(50). Glory notes that "her father woke up gruff sometimes, or confused. Sometimes he needed an hour or so to come into his own"(84). The phrase "to come into his own" points to his self as a personae assumed.

To block/ignore realities, Reverend Boughton and kin place a premium on appearance and form. Upon Jack's unexpected arrival, the reverend apologizes to his son,"you've caught me in my nightshirt"(32). While not having any idea when Jack might show, apparently Reverend Boughton has "been wearing a necktie for days, waking and sleeping"(32). He fears being caught out of uniform, so to speak. Rebel Jack also is concerned with appearing in a proper guise before his father. While they embrace and greet each other when he first arrives, before they sit down and talk both go off smarten up, each goes off to smarten up, to put on some form. Jack comes back "with his jaw polished and his hair combed" and his father announces his return with the noise of his "cane and the hard, formal shoes that took a good shine...[with] a roguish look in his eyes, as there always was when he felt at the top of his form"(34). He accepts Glory's help up stairs till Jack arrives (60).

For his family, for himself, Reverend Boughton has crafted a benevolent, Christian exterior that has too a certain extent become him. He projects faith, certainty, ease, humility. When his parish begins to marginalize him and dismiss his input as that of an old, out-of-touch man, he grows "furious on slight pretexts." This shocks his family, who concludes "he was not himself" and worries what is to happen. He eventually regains his long crafted personae, "he came back to himself, finally, reconciled to loss and sorrow and waiting on the Lord"(51). In truth, he has simply regained what will prove an increasingly untenable and unhealthy posture.

Jack too hides behind the form of manners. He is unfailingly polite, standing whenever Glory or their father enters a room. She realizes "It looked like deference, but it also seemed to mean, You will never see me at ease, you will never see me unguarded"(46).

Glory also trusts in rituals and forms. She almost invests them with magical powers. Uneasy and uncertain over Jack's return to Gilead, she sets and leaves the dining room table "for days....[until] she noticed dust on the plates and glasses and wiped them with her apron"(39). The first few hours of Jack's return do not go well, or according to any conceivably appropriate form of homecoming. Home is a meditation on the story of the prodigal son, but this return is anything like the one in the Bible. Still, in the hopes of "starting all over again, [Glory] made a dinner to welcome him home"(39). Pathetically, immediately after Jack's suicide attempt is discovered, she begins to not only try to cover for him by again resorting to the formality and ritual of a making a meal. She thinks, "How to announce the return of comfort and well-being except by cooking something fragrant. That is what her mother always did"(252).

It is tempting to see attachment to form and ritual as hypocritical. While in part it is so, it is motivated by a sincere conviction that appearance and form tends toward and shapes reality. A role eventually becomes one to a certain extent. Yet, these roles are also a bit like the inherited clothes of a large family like the Boughtons: "jackets and shoes that child after child stepped into, out of, ...too large and then too small, but never ever comfortable"(39).

Form has a positive side. Dependent on forms, religious practice confers strength, purpose and consolation to Reverend Boughton, Ames, and Glory to some extent. Glory persists in religious practices as an adult, even though she often expresses doubt as to the precise nature of what she is seeking by doing so. With an aside,Jack points out how form can authenticate and activate spiritual practices. Curious as to Glory's feelings about religion, he asks her "'Do you still, um,pray'-he gestured at the floor-'down on your knees?'"(103). Attempting to console Jack after his failed attempt to go to church, Boughton points out "Many people find it hard to go to church if they've been away for a while. I've seen it very often. And I'd say to them, It's because it means something to you'"(170). The ritual or form of going to a building, to a church service, expresses and tests the reality of our faith.

All learning and knowledge is dependent to some degree on form and inheritance, of learning/memorizing the wisdom of the past. A couple of questions related to the benefits and efficacy of form run through both Gilead and Home: how to pass on these pleasing and beneficial forms? Does achieving the form necessarily bring on the benefit of it?

Robinson addresses the issue metaphorically in the anecdote surrounding Glory and Grace's taking piano lessons. Their teacher employs a formal pedagogy presumably intended to elicit and draw out musical ability: she is "deft at smacking hands...Whack! when a note offended." Grace "actually liked piano. She practiced more than she needed to and learned more than was exacted of her." She has a musical bent despite her teacher's pedagogy. Eventually, Grache complains to their mother about the hand smacking teacher and the teacher relents with Grace. However, the hand-smacking teacher then "vented her pedagogical method on Glory," (54-55)suggesting that her method is more for her own benefit than in a self-less pursuit of a certain form. One almost wonders if all correction is more a venting of frustration on the part of the corrector than a method of achieving correction.

In search of changing his own heart and those around him, Jack pursues all sorts of forms and rituals. He invests himself in work in hopes of capturing a new self and putting away a bad, older self. Soon after arriving, he helps Glory with the garden. Glory is surprised to find "he knew how things were done. It had somehow never seemed to her that the place had his attention, or it seemed he was attentive to strategies of evasion and places of concealment, never to the skills of the ordinary, dutiful choring that made up most of every life, and was so much the worth and pride of that life"(61).

In addition, Jack tries to dress in ways which might answer his fathers and Glory's vision of him. It's not that his father doesn't acknowledge he's fallen, but his father sees this as the aberration. Glory too finds herself resorting to prodigal Jack as the aberration. Even late in the novel,the day after his suicide attempt is discovered, Jack spruces himself up and comes down from a nap and Glory thinks "He did look more like himself." But, at this point wiser, she acknowledges the falsity of the form Jack's assumed, a form he's assumed out of a desire for their love and acceptance. She thinks, "more like himself. An odd phrase, since he was always himself, perhaps never more so than he had been in the last two days." Jack still hasn't given up his faith in trust in forms though. He tells Glory, "'This is better, I think,'....and looked at her for confirmation"(290).

Manners and daily habits and rituals can provide comfort and stability. With the Boughtons, they too often take the place of people honestly expressing their love and hurt. At dinner, the trio routinely engage in conversations that neglect essentials. They pretend that nothing is unusual in their situation; "It was hard work talking to Jack. So little in his childhood or youth could be discussed without embarrassment"(63) and neither wishes to make him uncomfortable by addressing his twenty year absence or why he's returned. Glory observes that "the starchy proprieties observed in her family overlapped more or less precisely with Jack's strategies for avoiding humiliation"(87).

Careful not to expose any of his underlying weaknesses or needs, yet eager to love and care for him, the family reverts to a type of formal, over-zealous play-acting in order to show Jack they care. When Jack develops a splinter early on, both Glory and the Reverend go to great lengths to appear solicitous. Despite the fact that he probably might have pulled it out himself, Glory does it for him while her father runs about securing materials and offering advice, as if in an emergency situation. The reverend is trying to show his love. He is eager to reestablish his role as and be a caregiver and father. Thus, the Reverend advises Jack to "wash it and dry it again,'" and "then he daubed it here and there, finally where it should have been." Jack senses this and tries to play along, to be the son in need of a father's care: "Jack said, 'Ow,' for old times sake"(62). In part to answer their father's false suspicion that they don't care for each other, days later, Glory changes his bandage and brings "the gauze and the tape, and there where they knew [their father] could watch them, she tended to Jack's wound"(76).

This show is performed for their father's benefit and with little regard for the benefit of other parties. They are enacted in lieu of addressing Jack's more serious and difficult to treat wounds and hurts. Yet, the show is dangerous to the extent it postpones or ignores these wounds; it is akin to offering a cancer sufferer an aspirin when chemotherapy is needed.

The Boughton's shows and forms are also dangerous in that they are like games: governed by rules and strategy that dictate only a certain range of moves thus locking folks in roles and behaviors. This is to the good when the roles and behaviors are good, but not so good when the roles and behaviors are less than ideal. So Robinson suggests when Jack and his father sit down for checkers. Rather shortly into the game, Boughton concedes to his son, claiming to be "outflanked"(78). When Jack questions whether his father is sure, he shoots back "'Sure'? If I do this, you do that. And if I do this, you do that....It seems odd...that I should be the one to point it out!'" Jack points out, "'If you hadn't, I might not have thought of it'"(79).

As we discover later in Home and in Gilead, Jack has returned home seeking an environment in which he might begin to workout personal issues and pursue a more virtuous path in his life. Yet, Jack's response above during the checkers game suggests his long-standing delinquency and bad-apple behavior is a role that performs a function for their family in some fashion. It is part of a form that answers their father's needs. Everyone in the Boughton family (in any family?) gains their role in relation to the other roles enacted in the family; they coudln't fully perform all aspects of their role if the others altered their role. Early on, cheerfully griping, there's an edge in Glory's voice when she recalls her mother's telling her she took "'things too much to hear.'" Glory goes on to recite "That was always what was said about her. Hope was serene, Luke was generous, Teddy was brilliant, Jack was Jack, Grace was musical, and Glory took everything to heart"(14).

Beyond offering role definition for the others, Jack's role or self provides other satisfactions to those around him. Glory thinks:

My iniquity/punishment is greater than I can bear. In the Hebrew, her father said, that one word had two meanings and we chose one of them, which may make it harder for us to understand why the Lord would have pardoned Cain and protected him, and let him go on with his life, marry, have a son, build a city. His crime was his punishment, which had to mean he wasn't such a villain after all"(101).

As elaborated on by the whole of Gilead, Home is a rather moody meditation on predestination, an attempt to see how it might work and for what purposes. At points, Robinson suggests that the sheer beauty of forgiveness, the joy it provides the forgiver, makes necessary the sinner and his/her sin. Insofar as it is a role imposed and fulfilled, insofar as it rarely provides him an opportunity or position from which to forgive, Jack's sinner role has a sacrificial aspect to it. Similarly, his incorrigible behavior tests the depths of the Christian love they profess. Jack provides plenty of practice for a follower of Christ. After she uncovers his suicide attempt, Glory reflects how she made "a kind of happiness for herself out of the thought that she could be his rescuer" and realizes she suffers under the "illusion that she could help her father with the grief Jack caused, the grief Jack was, when it was far beyond her power to soothe or mitigate as the betrayal of Judas Iscariot"(248). Here, Glory seems to be echoing Jack's own contention that he may be destined to evil in order to serve the other members of his family, either as a test or a punishment.

Even Jack feels this. In an ambiguous aside one wishes Robinson would have developed, Glory thinks how "resigned to Jack's inacccessible strangeness she must be to forgive him" his suicide attempt. She muses, "They all did that, and he had understood why they did, and he laughed, and it had frightened him"(249). In effect, Jack is afraid that he is ultimately the victim of their forgiveness, their desire to be good Christians, their wish not to see one of themselves as evil.

Finally, forms and rituals don't bring back the past. Simply following the patterns and rituals from times past conjures up but tepid versions of the feel of past times or places. For the "dinner with Lazarus"(185), as Jack names it, "whatever part of her father's hopes for the evening could be satisfied by fragrance and candlelight and by the food consecrated to the rituals of Boughton celebration, that part at least had been seen to"(184). The material world of a past time and place can never be fully reconstituted. Even if it could, doing so would most likely never render the invisible aspects of that time and place. Such intangibles are never fully in our grasp; they are not so easily gotten.

Robinson goes on to expand on the deleterious effects of decorum and roles by looking at history. Throughout the novel, the characters in Home observe and comment on the ongoing civil rights confrontations occurring during the time the novel takes place. The Reverend Boughton is opposed, seeing the black demonstrators as outlaws and this is the issue. He tells Jack, "it is necessary to enforce the law....You cant have people running around the streets like that"(98). Of course, the civil rights demonstrations of the time were all about shifting perceptions. Fundamentally, black demonstrators were looking to break out of set roles and free everybody from confining, low and negative expectations. Beyond the fact that his wife is black, Jack has a natural affinity with the demonstrators' aims. He is a truly a black sheep, and ultimately, I think he aims to be appreciated as a sheep without doing anything drastic or unnatural to the color of his wool.

Forgiveness in Marilynne Robinson's Home

Forgiveness:

In an exchange between Jack and Glory, Robinson points out the difficulty involved in defining forgiveness. In this exchange, Jack suggests Glory's willingness to forgive him demonstrates that she is "too kind." Perhaps attempting to search out the depths of her self-hurting kindness, to find she has limits and still forgives him, Jack asks Glory if she could forgive her ex-fiance. Glory answers, "I'm not sure I understand the question, but the answer is no"(193). Glory's confusion as to her capacity to forgive her ex is occasioned by the idea of forgiveness. Sincere forgiveness is predicated on knowledge; it's dimensions are dependent on circumstances of time and place; it takes many forms and is evidenced by no precise activity. Yet, Glory has been wounded with a certainty; no circumstances since the wounding would cause her to forgive her ex-fiance. However small or insignificant, she would be incapable of any action that might be construed by anybody as forgiving him.

The reasons for Jack's return to Gilead are mysterious, to the reader and to the other characters in the book. Most of the latter assume that he seeks forgiveness. All try to offer in various ways and with various levels of success.

Boughton seeks to be the face of the loving and merciful God. As Jack's father, he has consistently offered Jack forgiveness for his sins. When Jack gets a very young girl pregnant, Boughton is driven to the edge of forgiveness. Boughton declares "the cruelty of it! the arrogance!," and Glory observes "she had never seem him brood and mutter for days at at a time, as if her were absorbing the fact that some transgressions are beyond mere mortal's capacity to forgive"(18).

Boughton is proud and can't accept his mere mortality when it comes to his powers of forgiveness. Growing up, his children are aware that "he had always avoided fault-finding, at least in the actual words he spoke to them. But there was from to time a tone of rebuke in his voice that overrode the mildest of intentions"(84). When he's done brooding and muttering, he has failed to absorb the fact and persists in forgiveness, even beyond his reasonable abilities and to his detriment. This behavior is in keeping with his tendency to cling to his belief and block out contradicting experience.

Glory believes that "it was the sad privilege of blood relations to love [Jack] despite all"(69) while realizing "'despite all' was a dangerous formula"(70). It is dangerous to Jack. On his last trip home, before he largely disappears into twenty years of dissipation, Jack sits down with his father one last time, face to face alone, presumably to discuss what he needs to do vis a vis the very young girl he's impregnated. On the way out of that meeting, it is Glory who takes it upon herself to suggest he marry the young girl he's impregnated. One can only imagine (as Glory likely did also) that the Reverend Boughton has avoided any such harsh advice. Jack is taken aback, and replies "You've seen her." Glory asks what their father will do in that case. Snidely, Jack asks "'Do to me? Nothing. I mean, he's going to forgive me.' He laughed. 'And now I have a train to catch'"(57).

Boughton blindness on the civil rights battles going on undercuts his moral authority in Jack's eyes. Boughton is sensitive to Jack's perceptions in this area. When Ames' abolitionist grandfather comes up, Boughton dismisses him, remarking "there was a lot of what you might call fanaticism around here in early days....he was crazy when I knew him, and before that too, I believe"(204). Like Ames, Jack is moved by the elder Ames' conviction and his father warns, "certainty can be dangerous"(204). While Gilead makes clear that Ames' is partially inclined to agree with Boughton's doubts as to certainty, he also is certain that doubt and moderation carry grave moral hazards. Of course, given that Gilead furnishes us with Ames' interior while Home provides us no counterpart for Boughton, we can't be certain of Boughton's actual views.

Ames is Boughton's "alter ego, in whom he had confided so long and so utterly that he was a second father to them all, not least in knowing more about them than was entirely consistent with their comfort"(5). Glory recalls how the Boughton children made "their father promise not to tell anyone, by which [their father] knew they meant Reverend Ames"(5). After she tells Jack that his siblings were "always proud of him" and saw him "as chimerical, piratical and mercurial," Jack is quick to point out that "Ames always saw right through me. And when he looks at me, he stills sees a scoundrel"(126).

Ames' love is ultimately conditioned on some sense of justice. He does not search out imperfections but can't help but see and absorb the gross defects in Jack's character. Ironically, his love's conditional nature seems to make it a more valuable commodity in the eyes of the Boughton children, most especially Jack. Even years later, Jack has a oddly powerful desire that Ames see him in a good light. After Jack plays the piano for Ames and Boughton, Boughton praises an absent Jack, asking Glory to "'Tell Jack that was wonderful. I was proud of him.'" Glory does so. Jack asks," 'Was Ames still here when he said that?'" Glory confesses and then tries to cover: "'Not when he said it to me. Ames would have known it anyway'"(196).

Ames potentially offers Jack a forgiveness informed by certain aspects of Christian teaching on the matter. Such forgiveness demands the sinner acknowledge and see the ugliness of his sins; the sinner must undergo a painful journey. One of the classical expressions of the forgiveness Ames' offers is psalm 51 and it is interesting to note the language Jack uses in recounting his experience at Ames' church. He tells Glory that Ames' sermon on Hagar and Ishmael was designed to "appall me" and left him "aghast." It was intended to turn him "white...whiter"(206), echoing the sinner's plea in Psalm 51:"Purge me with Hysop and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow."

While Jack it taken aback by Ames sermon, Ames continues to draw him. This suggests Jack has a desire for a penance, some way, real or symbolic, by which he might compensate those he hurt, make right the wrong he did. His father apologizes for being critical and Jack replies, "I had it coming...I deserve rebuke." His father refuses to accept this, advising Jack to let "the Lord decide what you deserve." He adds, "Nobody deserves anything, good or bad. It's all grace"(271). On the one hand, such sentiment might supply some comfort. However, on the other, it renders the universe a mystery and our selves as pretty powerless. For Jack, it means that he can't please his father and this is the way God intended it. There is little wonder that Jack has a love/hate relationship with his father and his beliefs.

Some part of Jack wishes to be found worthy enough to be held accountable. After Jack's suicide attempt, Glory tends a severely depressed and hungover Jack. She thinks to call Lila hoping she has a way of comforting him and relieving his hangover. She believes Lila

"might know some simple, commonplace treatment for hangover, some cool hand on the brow that would wake Jack from his sweaty sleep, as if penance were swept aside by absolution. If there were such a thing, Jack would know and would have asked for it, unless misery was the way he spoke to himself, unless he had meant to recruit his whole body to the work of misery. There would be a rightness in his grieving in every nerve."(253)

Penance inevitably is occasioned by emotions (hurt, anger) and expresses emotions (grieving, sorrow). Because Boughton suppresses a certain range of emotions, penance is made difficult. Anger and sadness are frowned upon in the Boughton home. Such emotions threaten their father's conception of himself and his family, his creation. Even as an adult returned home, Glory "was wary of certain thoughts, certain memories, because her father could not bear her unhappiness....she did no permit herself to brood....It would make him miserable"(16). In addition to sadness, she has been trained to suppress anger and disappointment. When Jack attempts suicide, Robinson almost comically notes how Glory "was almost disappointed that she couldn't be angry at him"(249). The qualifying adverb suggests the extent to which Glory's been taught to suppress negative feelings and thoughts.



Still, the stern Ishmael-Hagar sermon Ames delivers Jack offends Glory. She swears "I'll never forgive him"(211). But, Jack claims "I'll forgive him. Maybe I've forgiven him already....He might take it as a sign of character. It might look like generosity or humility or something"(211). He sees a specious forgiveness as the only "'undamaging choice left to me. Which might also have the look of virtue'"(211) and advises Glory to follow his lead to keep their father happy.

At times, in a passive-aggressive way, Boughton is inclined to punish his son. He continually brings Jack toward himself, welcoming him as it were, only to then lay bare his hurt, to lay his grievances at Jack's feet. Boughton continually misreads Jack, failing to see and accept who his son is. Yet, despite all of this, Boughton is working out forgiving his son. Within their world views, there are no protocols for forgiveness, no ceremonies of sacrifice and redemption. Instead, they attempt to forge behavior or actions that will convey forgiveness. Thus, all Boughton's evasive references to his son's past, his wariness to broach certain past events and issues, his efforts to suppress his grievance in favor a forced happiness.

Boughton is striving toward forgiveness, toward covering and ignoring Jack's sins in hopes of achieving a reconciliation and a togetherness. At points, it seems that with all their weakness and foibles, for all of their clumsy and awkward exchanges, Boughton has achieved forgiving his son, howsoever stunted the forgiveness offered may be. Ultimately, the quality of forgiveness he offers Jack is not enough to satisfy Jack. Jack wants not to be loved as a sinner; instead, he wants to be loved and trusted as the person he can become.

Boughton never quite forgives Jack in this fashion; he never pardons him unconditionally. Looking to explain the letters returned from Della, he tells Glory, "He's not a young man, not likely to change his life, and I don't think it's been a very good life. I can see why a woman might......"(231). This is exactly what Jack suspects his father thinks of him, and speaks to Boughton's harboring an unresolved animosity toward his son. This comes out at the end of the story. After first claiming not to recognize Jack, he again accuses Jack of all his misdeeds. Glory objects, "'That was so long ago. Can't we put it aside?'" Bougnton shoots back "Have you put it aside?'"(295)

While the comment above indicates that Boughton hasn't quite forgiven Jack, Glory is closer. She needs to work toward it. At points, she resists pardoning him. For Glory, his unpardonable sin seems his involvement with the girl, rather than his neglect of the child. The clear implication is that she is underage. "That was where fault lay, impervious to rationalization, finally even to pardon. Such an offense against any notion of honor, her father had said, and so it still seemed to her, and to him, after all those years"(235).

Yet, this is an emotion of the moment. After his suicide attempt, it is Glory who steps in and tries yet again to bring Jack back. He appears in that scene like a Lazarus figure, and she literally cleans filth off him. While doing so, she regrets "she couldn't be angry at him." She realizes she and her father have grown "resigned to Jack's inaccessible strangeness" to the point where even after his suicide attempt she almost automatically forgives him "entirely and almost immediately." In a bit of dark humor, she vows "I will not forgive him for an hour or two"(249).

By the end of the story, Glory has come to a more expansive and sincere forgiveness of Jack. She knows his sins, acknowledges them, but still tells Jack, "Your soul seems fine to me." She adds, "I don't know what that means...Anyway, it's true"(288). Jack's is a troubled soul that still strives. It is what it is and as such is touched with something divine. Glory sees and accepts it as a part of God's creation, even with it's self-imposed defects. She recognizes the truth of what Jack tells his father: "'I don't know why I am what I am. I'd have been like you if I could'"(293).

On another level,she forgives Jack in order to save her previous investment in him, so that all the forgiveness previously extended does not go for nought. Jack challenges her. He tells her that while he lived a better life under Della's influence, apart from her he fell down. His better self was "Nothing I can sustain on my own...You forgive so much, you'll have to forgive that, too. Well, I guess you won't have to"(289). Of course, Jack knows she will. She's invested.

While Boughton strives to forgive Jack, Ames fails to do the same. Perhaps forgiveness has higher stakes for Ames. While Jack can hurt his father again, he can't hurt him anew. With a young wife and a child he adores, Ames deeply fears Jack. Threatened, his ignoring, covering or forgetting of Jack's past potentially imperils not only himself, but, as he sees it and with some warrant, his wife and child He who forgives potentially endangers not only himself, but others around him. Our desire to forgive might be compromised by our responsibility to others. Granted, primarily, Ames' has found his true love late in life, and because Jack poses a threat to this, he is unable to forgive him.

Genuine forgiveness must be built on a certain level of knowledge between the parties. Interrupting a porch chat on predestination, Boughton exclaims, "'Oh! I am a very sinful man!'"(222). Ames immediately rushes to dissuade him of this, to claim it it not true. This constitutes a type of forgiveness. However, Boughton wont accept it immediately, countering Ames offer by claiming "'You don't really know me!'"(222). Likewise, Glory claims to know Jack and points to this knowledge as the basis of her forgiveness of him. Reasoning with Jack about Della, she offers, "I know you a little now, and you're really not so hard to forgive"(191). Jack counters her by suggesting her knowledge of his perfidy is incomplete. He quickly kills the conversation.

Yet, forgiveness also demands or requires that the granter forget. The one granting forgiveness must allow the sinner to be someone different; Lila provides this for Jack. She doesn't know him and so he can pursue a new self in front of her with greater ease. For the others in Jack's circle, his past self remains a part of how they see him. When Jack happens upon his father and Ames discussing his relation with Della, he "walked in on a potent thought of himself, like Lazarus with the memory of cerements about him no matter how often he might shave or comb his hair"(240).

True forgiveness goes beyond covering or ignoring the sins of the sinner. It involves altering our very feelings and conception of the sinner. Difficult if not impossible.
Yet, compelled by love, Glory and her father seem compelled to forgive.

The Unpossessed City by Jon Fasman

There's a Walter Mitty aspect to Jon Fasman's thriller The Unpossessed City. Jim Vilatzer is a going-nowhere, thirty-something who's squandering away his potential working in his family's little strip-mall diner in Rockville, Maryland. When he runs into problems with a loan shark, he decides he needs to get away, very far away. Using language skills picked up from his Russian immigrant father, he takes a job in Moscow with an NGO, The Memory Foundation, attempting to collect the stories of gulag survivors. In trying to collect interviews for this group, Jim unwittingly becomes a "human black box...a person who carries information without knowing it"(95). Entangled by a young Russian woman with whom he falls in love, Jim ends up ferrying coded messages for a group of conspirators looking to smuggle ex-Soviet weapon scientists to the highest bidder. Doing so, he comes to attention of the CIA and Russian intelligence. Eventually, wanted by all, he needs to make a thrilling run for the Ukrainian border with a group of charming but violent Tatar mobsters he befriends in his apartment complex.

The story is far-fetched and hard to follow in all of it's plot machinations. I was never clear on why the conspirators needed to pass along the messages that Jim passes. And, there is not a whole lot of cloak and dagger. A chunk of the book is taken up with Jim tracking down and interviewing supposed Gulag survivors who tell him stories that actually contain coded messages for the conspirators. A general air of menace and threat hangs over Jim at all times, but this is not owing to his being a dupe in a dangerous criminal scheme, but simply too his being a foreigner in corrupt and crime plagued post-Yeltsin Russia.

The book's redeeming feature is its setting, Moscow. Fasman and his main character share an attachment to the city. Local Muscovites are constantly asking Vilatzer why he's in Moscow. Of course, there is the gambling debt. However, as time goes by, Vilatzer finds himself fascinated by his temporary home, "a city that constantly challenged its denizens to survive it unscathed. These challenges superseded mere crime, chaos, culture, or language. What it came down to, really was finding a way to feel human in a city designed to make one feel insignificant"(47). Life in Moscow is raw and given to extremes. As Vilatzer sees it, "American life....tends to flatten out the extreme-one can go years seeing no infraction more serious than running a stop sign, but receiving from strangers nothing friendlier than a professional, tight-lipped grin in a store." In Moscow, on the other hand, "if you occasionally saw a thug send a beggar sprawling, you also had strangers who pulled you out of harm's way"(166).

In the course of unfolding his plot, Fasman brings his keen eye and sharp, literate wit to a virtual tour of the city. We are taken into a trendy night club in the Arbat, Sporting Palace where:

All activities except the brothel took place in different corners of this single huge room with concrete walls and floor, lit by bare high-wattage light bulbs dangling from the ceiling some five stories up and screwed into dangling, obviously improvised electrical outlets. It had all the aesthetic appeal of a displaced-persons camp. The hundred of patrons milling around in various states of debauch could never come close to making the space feel anything but gloomy and underpopulated. The light gave everyone a ghoulish, hungry look, made their shadows shrink and expand as they teetered from one area to the next. Cinder-block partitions separated the various activities from one another, and uniformed security personnel, all holding submachine guns and wearing belts with pistols, Tasers, truncheons, and pepper spray, kept the patrons in line: no mean feat when some of those patrons were half-drunk and test-firing automatic rifles at the long, narrow range at the back of the room (110).

He offers a compelling sketch of a tea kiosk in the metro: "There was something so sweet, so human, so maternal about the process: the kiosk matron, a kind-eyed woman with a hesitant, sorrowful smile just past middle age filled an electric kettle from a ten gallon container of water, plugged it in, and showed him an array of cardboard tea boxes behind her. There was no focus-group chosen music; she was not a moonlighting actress or an undiscovered genius; she wore neither a uniform nor an insincere smile"(123-124).Ok, there is something cranky in a comment like this. Writers celebrating the little folks; always celebrating them while running a mile a minute from them in their real lives.

We visit Izmailovsky's Vernisazh market in an eastern suburb of Moscow which offers "several square miles" of kitsch (127-), a trailer casino where the "machines...[showed] far more signs of life than their users"(142), a hellish army hospital where instruments are 'sterilized' in water brought to a boil on hot pots. We take numerous trips on the Moscow metro that "seems more an ecosystem or a natural phenomenon than a commuter rail network"(165). We go through its stations ruled over by "Armies of stern babushki [who] keep the stations in relative order"(165).

This book details a love affair between the writer and the city where:

the extremes of brutality and warmth...played out on every level, from the sneering clerk and the office manager who made sure you wore comfortable slippers to the savage apartment blocks and the fairy-tale churches; the way the city and its people nurtured their scars; the salutary effects of difference, of being forced to figure out and improvise rather than taking life and its patterns for granted; the lusts unleashed after decades of repression; the honest vibrancy...In truth, though, falling in love with a city is like falling in love with a person: explicable only up to a certain point. After that other people just havve to take your feelings on faith."