Jenny Reviews: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

 The Vitals

 Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
 Release Date: 10 January 2006
 Page Count: 247
 Genre: Literary Fiction
 Target Audience: Adult
 Series: Gilead #1
 Source and Format: Purchased :: Paperback
 Goodreads | Amazon

 Summary (From Goodreads)
Twenty-four years after her first novel, Housekeeping,   Marilynne Robinson returns with an intimate tale of three   generations from the Civil War to the twentieth century: a story about fathers and sons and the spiritual battles that still rage at America's heart. Writing in the tradition of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, Marilynne Robinson's beautiful, spare, and spiritual prose allows "even the faithless reader to feel the possibility of transcendent order" (Slate). In the luminous and unforgettable voice of Congregationalist minister John Ames, Gilead reveals the human condition and the often unbearable beauty of an ordinary life.

Notes on Gilead

This short novel blew me away. I was compiling a list of people to recommend it to before I was even half way through with it. It is an epistolary novel (a novel written in letter, diary, etc. format) whose narrator is an old man who has reached the end of his life. He did not have a son until late in life and wants his son to be able to know who he was in his own words. As he reflects back on his own life and the events and people that shaped him, he is working out his thoughts, feelings, and salvation in the events that are happening in his present (as he is writing the letters). 

This is a book that you savor. It is not meant to be read in one sitting, though there is a great temptation to do just that. The reflective, self-aware tone of the novel is lost if one does not respect it and adhere to the pace Robinson sets for the reader. John Ames is one of the most honest, clear-thinking characters in modern literature. His is an honesty that soothes and convicts, that alternately tears and heals. I hope everyone is able to experience just a fraction of the self-awareness Ames has. To be able to see ourselves clearly, even for just a bit, is truly life-changing. I say this with full confidence, having survived my own season of self-awareness not too long ago. It is exhilarating, humbling, and defeating. But totally worth it. 

Even if you are not given to contemplation I think you should read this book. Learning how to think critically of yourself is a gift (and burden) that should be nurtured. When we strip away the lies that we believe about ourselves we are, finally, truly, able to grow into who we were meant to be. Is it painful? No doubt. Is it worth it? Read Gilead and see.

Memorable Quotes

“Love is holy because it is like grace--the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.”

“There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal. So how could it subordinate itself to cause or consequence?”

“I don't know exactly what covetous is, but in my experience it is not so much desiring someone else's virtue or happiness as rejecting it, taking offense at the beauty of it.”

“Nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense.”