Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Acts of Devotion

GILEAD By Marilynne Robinson. 247 pp. Farrar,

Straus & Giroux. $23.

TO bloom only every 20 years would make, you would think, for anxious or vainglorious flowerings. But Marilynne Robinson, whose last (and first) novel, "Housekeeping," appeared in 1981, seems to have the kind of sensibility that is sanguine about intermittence. It is a mind as religious as it is literary -- perhaps more religious than literary -- in which silence is itself a quality, and in which the space around words may be full of noises. A remarkable, deeply unfashionable book of essays, "The Death of Adam" (1998), in which Robinson passionately defended John Calvin and American Puritanism, among other topics, suggested that, far from suffering writer's block, Robinson was exploring thinker's flow: she was moving at her own speed, returning repeatedly to theological questions and using the essay to hold certain goods that, for one reason or another, had not yet found domicile in fictional form.

But here is a second novel, and it is no surprise to find that it is religious, somewhat essayistic and fiercely calm. "Gilead" is a beautiful work -- demanding, grave and lucid -- and is, if anything, more out of time than Robinson's book of essays, suffused as it is with a Protestant bareness that sometimes recalls George Herbert (who is alluded to several times, along with John Donne) and sometimes the American religious spirit that produced Congregationalism and 19th-century Transcendentalism and those bareback religious riders Emerson, Thoreau and Melville.

"Gilead" is set in 1956 in the small town of Gilead, Iowa, and is narrated by a 76-year-old pastor named John Ames, who has recently been told he has angina pectoris and believes he is facing imminent death. In this terminal spirit, he decides to write a long letter to his 7-year-old son, the fruit of a recent marriage to a much younger woman. This novel is that letter, set down in the easy, discontinuous form of a diary, mixing long and short entries, reminiscences, moral advice and so on. (Robinson was perhaps influenced by the similar forms of the two most famous books narrated by clergymen, Francis Kilvert's diary and Georges Bernanos's novel "The Diary of a Country Priest.")

Robinson, as if relishing the imposition, has instantly made things hard for herself: the diary form that reports on daily and habitual occurrences tends to be relatively static; it is difficult to whip the donkey of dailiness into big, bucking, dramatic scenes. Those who, like this reader, feel that novels -- especially novels about clergymen -- are best when secular, comic and social, may need a few pages to get over the lack of these elements. In fact, "Gilead" does have a gentle sort of comedy -- though there is nothing here to match the amusing portraits in "Housekeeping" -- but it is certainly a pious, even perhaps a devotional work, and its characters move in a very small society.

The great danger of the clergyman in fiction is that his doctrinal belief will leak into the root system of the novel and turn argument into piety, drama into sermon. This is one of the reasons that, in the English tradition, from Henry Fielding to Barbara Pym, the local vicar is usually safely contained as hypocritical, absurd or possibly a bit dimwitted. Robinson's pastor is that most difficult narrator from a novelist's point of view, a truly good and virtuous man, and occasionally you may wish he possessed a bit more malice, avarice or lust -- or just an intriguing unreliability.

John Ames has cherished baptizing infants: "That feeling of a baby's brow against the palm of your hand -- how I have loved this life." He loves the landscape too: "I have lived my life on the prairie and a line of oak trees can still astonish me." When he informs us that he has written more than 2,000 sermons, and that he has written almost all of them "in the deepest hope and conviction," the reader surely protests: "Never in boredom or fatigue or sheer diligence?" and perhaps thinks longingly of Yorick, the parson in "Tristram Shandy" who, at the bottom of his eloquent funeral eulogy, is seen to have written an improper "Bravo!" to himself, so secularly pleased is he with his own eloquence.

But while John Ames may be a good man, he is not an uninteresting one, and he has a real tale to tell. His grandfather, also named John Ames and also a preacher, came out to Kansas from Maine in the 1830's and ended up fighting on the Union side in the Civil War. He knew John Brown and lost an eye in that war. The book's narrator remembers his grandfather as a formidable, old-fashioned warrior for God who used to conduct church services while wearing his pistol.

Robinson's portraits of the old man are vivid slashes of poetry. Marvelously, we see Grandfather Ames as "a wild-haired, one-eyed, scrawny old fellow with a crooked beard, like a paintbrush left to dry with lacquer in it." He seemed to his grandson "stricken and afflicted, and indeed he was, like a man everlastingly struck by lightning, so that there was an ashiness about his clothes and his hair never settled and his eye had a look of tragic alarm when he wasn't actually sleeping. He was the most unreposeful human being I ever knew except for certain of his friends." Our narrator recalls entering the house as a little boy and being told by his mother that "the Lord is in the parlor." Looking in, he sees his grandfather talking with God, "looking attentive and sociable and gravely pleased. I would hear a remark from time to time, 'I see your point,' or 'I have often felt that way myself.' "

But our narrator's father, also called John Ames and also a preacher, was a very different kind of man. He was a pacifist and he quarreled with Grandfather Ames, so that the older man, who had been living with his son, left the house and wandered off to Kansas, where he died. "Gilead" is much concerned with fathers and sons, and with God the father and his son. The book's narrator returns again and again to the parable of the prodigal son -- the son who returned to his father and was forgiven, but did not deserve forgiveness. Ames's life has lately been irradiated by his unexpected marriage and by the gift of his little son, and he consoles himself that although he won't see him grow up, he will be reunited with him in heaven: "I imagine your child self finding me in heaven and jumping into my arms, and there is a great joy in the thought."

Gradually, Robinson's novel teaches us how to read it, suggests how we might slow down to walk at its own processional pace, and how we might learn to coddle its many fine details. Nowadays, when so many writers are acclaimed as great stylists, it's hard to make anyone notice when you praise a writer's prose. There is, however, something remarkable about the writing in "Gilead." It's not just a matter of writing well, although Robinson demonstrates that talent on every page: the description of the one-eyed grandfather, who "could make me feel as though he had poked me with a stick, just by looking at me," or one of a cat held by Ames's little son, eager to escape, its ears flattened back and its tail twitching and its eyes "patiently furious." It isn't just the care with which Robinson can relax the style to a Midwestern colloquialism: "But one afternoon a storm came up and a gust of wind hit the henhouse and lifted the roof right off, and hens came flying out, sucked after it, I suppose, and also just acting like hens." (How deceptively easy that little coda is -- "and also just acting like hens" -- but how much it conveys.)

Robinson's words have a spiritual force that's very rare in contemporary fiction -- what Ames means when he refers to "grace as a sort of ecstatic fire that takes things down to essentials." There are plenty of such essentialists in American fiction (writers like Kent Haruf and Cormac McCarthy), and Robinson is sometimes compared to them, but their essentials are generally not religious.

In ordinary, secular fiction, a writer who "takes things down to essentials" is reducing language to increase the amount of secular meaning (or sometimes, alas, to decrease it). When Robinson reduces her language, it's because secular meaning has exhausted itself and is being renovated by religious meaning. Robinson, who loves Melville and Emerson, cannot rid herself of the religious habit of using metaphor as a form of revelation. Ames spends much time musing on the question of what heaven will be like. Surely, he thinks, it will be a changed place, yet one in which we can still remember our life on earth: "In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets." There sings a true Melvillean note.

As the novel progresses, its language becomes sparer, lovelier, more deeply infused with Ames's yearning metaphysics. His best friend, an old Presbyterian minister named Boughton, who lives nearby and is also ailing, has a wayward son, now in his 40's, who returns to Gilead in the course of the novel. Boughton's son comes to Ames for spiritual counsel, and his sad story provides a counterpoint to the relationship Ames has with his 7-year-old -- which he would dearly like to continue beyond the grave.

Ames does not want to die and dislikes aging, not least because he cannot play vigorously with his son: "I feel as if I am being left out, as though I'm some straggler and people can't quite remember to stay back for me." At the end of the book, Boughton's son leaves Gilead even as his own father is on his deathbed, and Ames registers the filial cruelty of this act: "It was truly a dreadful thing he was doing, leaving his father to die without him. It was the kind of thing only his father would forgive him for."

Only his father and only His Father. The link between the terrestrial relationship and the religious one is made explicit when Ames recalls that "Augustine says the Lord loves each of us as an only child, and that has to be true. 'He will wipe the tears from all faces.' It takes nothing from the loveliness of the verse to say that is exactly what will be required." Heaven, then, as Ames sees it -- and perhaps Robinson too -- will afford a special kind of amnesty, a sublime gratuity, in which those who least deserve forgiveness will most joyously receive it. Ames hints at this when he reflects on his own unspectacular filial piety: "I myself was the good son, so to speak, the one who never left his father's house. . . . I am one of those righteous for whom the rejoicing in heaven will be comparatively restrained."

Robinson's book ends in characteristic fashion, with its feet planted firmly on the Iowa soil and its eyes fixed imploringly on heaven, as a dying man daily pictures Paradise but also learns how to prolong every day -- to extend time, even on earth, into a serene imitation of eternity: "Light is constant, we just turn over in it. So every day is in fact the selfsame evening and morning." "Gilead" closes as simply as it opened: "I'll pray, and then I'll sleep."

The Church at Dawn

It's a plain old church and it could use a coat of paint. But in the dark times I used to walk over before sunrise just to sit there and watch the light come into that room. I don't know how beautiful it might seem to anyone else. I felt much at peace those mornings, praying over very dreadful things sometimes -- the Depression, the wars. There was a lot of misery for people around here, decades of it. But prayer brings peace, as I trust you know.

In those days, as I have said, I might spend most of a night reading. Then, if I woke up still in my armchair, and if the clock said four or five, I'd think how pleasant it was to walk through the streets in the dark and let myself into the church and watch dawn come in the sanctuary. I loved the sound of the latch lifting. The building has settled into itself so that when you walk down the aisle, you can hear it yielding to the burden of your weight. It's a pleasanter sound than an echo would be, an obliging, accommodating sound. You have to be there alone to hear it. Maybe it can't feel the weight of a child. But if it is still standing when you read this, and if you are not half a world away, sometime you might go there alone, just to see what I mean. After a while I did begin to wonder if I liked the church better with no people in it. . . .

In the old days I could walk down every single street, past every house, in about an hour. I'd try to remember the people who lived in each one, and whatever I knew about them, which was often quite a lot. . . . And I'd pray for them. And I'd imagine peace they didn't expect and couldn't account for descending on their illness or their quarreling or their dreams. Then I'd go into the church and pray some more and wait for daylight. I've often been sorry to see a night end, even while I have loved seeing the dawn come.

Trees sound different at night, and they smell different too. From "Gilead."

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section 7, Page 1 of the National edition with the headline: Acts of Devotion. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT