In several blogs, I would like to present my thoughts and reactions to Marilynne Robinson's novel Home. I loved Gilead. The two novels share the same story: the return of the black sheep Jack Boughton to his family and childhood home of Gilead, Iowa. It is a version of the prodigal son story and both novels explore issues that I'm interested in: forgiveness, redemption, repentance, and the complex dynamics of families.
Gilead is the more satisfying literary work. It is so lyrical, so eloquent, and moving. Gilead is the voice of the Reverend Ames, and the entire text is redolent with this fully realized character. It is hard to imagine that he doesn't exist. Home is a more traditional novel. Its narrative voice is more distant; although it is often a capturing of Glory's thoughts and perceptions of events, sometimes it almost takes on the traditional quality of omniscience. Home is less succinct statement. There seem to be a steady accumulation of scenes that almost becomes repetitive. It is infused with a drama that seems disproportionate for a story about a 1950's minister's family. There's an almost wearying amount of pathos, although, seeing as the characters have some responsibility for their misfortunes, perhaps what is wearying is the unrelenting tragedy of Jack and his life. Of course, the responsibility of all is under question in Home and how far folks can be blamed is a central issue. The characters are whiny at times and far less likeable than the characters in Gilead. Of course, they are the same characters. Ultimately, it seems an effort to explore in depth and breadth the issues outlined above. It feels like Robinson's last word on these subjects.
Yet, for folks who loved Gilead, for those interested in the idea and reality of forgiveness, Home is essential. In terms of the issues addressed by both novels, Gilead treads carefully; Ames is a man who is afraid to step outside of his moderation, his Christian compassion. In Gilead, he's striving to write himself to himself as a mild and loving soul and struggles against judgment and rash or dramatic action. The characters in Home are far less well-behaved and the issues that dominate both novels get a good hashing out.
So, what follows is my reaction to Robinson's second take on the story of Jack Boughton. In this blog, I wish to look at the function of home.
HOME AS RELIC/SACRED SPACE
"The house embodied all the general blessedness of his life, which was manifest, really indisputable. And which he never failed to acknowledge, especially when it stood over against any particular sorrow(1)".
The Reverend Boughton has lived in his house all his life. He has maintained the house as it was when his children were young, at a moment from the past he would preserve, when life seemed complete. And, he's preserved it to some effect. When Jack returns home after being away for 20 years, he "noticed one thing and another as if mildly startled, even affronted, by all the utter sameness...[he] put his hand on the shoulder of his mother's chair...the fringe on a lampshade, as if to confirm for himself that the uncanny persistence of half-forgotten objects...was not some trick of the mind"(52).
In a sense, this is a shrine, a church dedicated to the memory of something sacred: the Boughton family. Like a church space, it is a place of communion, of the type of shared consciousness and memory that ideally marks a family. As Glory put it, "There on the immutable terrain of their childhood her brothers and sisters could and did remember those years in great detail, their own memories, but more often the pooled memory they saw no special need to portion out among them"(8).
The dining room where they ate innumerable Sunday dinners is rendered with traces evoking sacred spaces. It is a "place of solemn and perpetual evening, [where] every family joy had been given its occasion"(40). Yet, it is dedicated to a certain experience; by reproducing the place of that experience, it aims to make always available a reproduction of that experience. All members bring themselves and their lives here to bask in the glow of their families love, a love that is an echo and precursor of the love of God. An almost heavenly comfort and ease is intended. Glory speculates "her father must have meant to preserve all this memory, this sheer power of sameness, so that when they came home, or when Jack came home, there would be no need to say anything. In the terms of the place, they would all always have known everything"(88).
The Reverend Boughton presides over this little heaven as it's unassuming and self-denying deity. As such, Glory reverently works to please him, as a worshipoer carefully preparing and offering a pleasing sacrifice, as on the evening when the Ameses visit. Her attempts to please her father fail this evening, but the language she uses in recounting it cloth her efforts with the air of a religious rite. She laments "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).
Yet, if this may have been a heaven for most of the Boughton children, it never seemed so to Jack. He has always been the problem; how to explain this unhappy child of God in the heaven created for him. Beyond the enigmatic Jack, the unchanging nature of the Boughton home is threatening to Glory. Being so mired in the past, she fears this precious and precise version of her childhood home might elicit or demand (via her desire to please its maestro, her father) previous incarnations of her own self. It seems to her as if she might re-assume her childhood self when surrounded by the surroundings of that childhood.
Unlike Jack, Glory finds many pleasures and much consolation in this well-preserved terrain from her childhood. She has fond memories of the time it seeks to capture. Glory is not somebody fleeing the past. After she moves away, she continued daily Bible reading because it helped her "remember the household she came from, to induce the unspecific memory of a comfort she had not really been conscious of until she left it behind" (102). On the first Sunday after Jack returns, Glory prepares a traditional Sunday dinner, and when "she walked in from the garden, the house had already begun to smell like Sunday. It brought tears to her eyes. That old orderliness, aloof from all disruption"(39).
Part of Glory is inclined to grant that their childhood home is gone along with her childhood. She will never be able to re-assume her childhood certainty, joy, hope and faith. In the light of such feelings, her father's carefully preserved monument to the past seems pathetic, a spiritless corpse life out of which all life has leaked out, leaving behind a sad if not appalling thing in need of burial. When Glory discovers she's inherited the house, initially she's horrified. She tells Jack, "This is a nightmare I've had a hundred times. the one where all the rest of you go off and begin your lives and I am left in an empty house.....waiting for someone to notice I'm missing and come back for me. and nobody does"(298).
At the end, the dying Boughton recognizes the impulse and folly of his project. He laments and regrets it: "'Why did I ever expect to keep anything? That isn't how life is'"(296). While he's unable to act on it, the lesson his life teaches is that we must let go and the grace with which we do so distinguishes us.
It appears a lesson lost on Glory. It is a lesson lost on the living. The house housed a holy family. A place where a number of people loved and felt loved. With the exception of Jack, everyone felt this love. That moment occurred long before the events in the novel and that state seems long vanished. Yet, it persists in memory, and in memory it prompts attempts to find it again.
Just before Jack launches back out into the world, he goes to hear another of Ames' sermons. He tells Glory "it was about idolatry, about the worship of things, on one hand the material world, in the manner of scientific rationalism, and on the other hand-chairs and tables and old purple drapes, in the manner of Boughtons and totemists"(310). Yet, despite his mockery here, despite he never felt part of the love here, Jack still invests hope that a place like his childhood home could be a place where he might potentially love and be loved in a foretaste of heaven. Glory promises him, "I won't change a thing." She realizes how important the idea of the Temple is, and she takes up the responsibility of preserving it. And, yet Jack's likening this practice to idolatry is on the mark.
It is Lila who is the voice of wisdom in this novel. I think Robinson fails Lila a bit. She's presented as a person who just knows and lives the truth but never thinks. Her pronouncements lack a finish somehow. They seem vague. But, one gathers Robinson intends them as a better way. In terms of preserving moments of divine experience, Lila knows what dying taught Boughton. She approaches the task with bounded expectations.
She tells Glory that when Ames dies she and the boy will need to move away, likely to a less pristine and simple place. She is not intent on moving the Ames' home board by board. Nor does she given in to sadness or regret. Lila and Glory go down to the river with Lila's son and his friend. They stop to watch the boys "racing leaves through an eddy between two ribs of sand. [Lila} said, 'We hope he'll remember something of it.' Then Glory had seen the place as if it were the kind of memory a woman might wish for her child"(283).
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