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Gilead (Gilead, #1)

Marilynne Robinson

Start date: December 15, 2008

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Apr 08, 2025 Laurel Bradshaw rated it it was amazing

Shelves: audiobook, 1st-of-series, clergy, pulitzer-prize, 1950s, family-secrets, literary-fiction, kansas, books-to-re-read, iowa

5 purple stars.

Coming from a long line of ministers on my father's side, and a long line of Kansas settlers in my mother's side, this had a lot of resonance for me. This is a meditation on life, on inheritance, and on what we leave behind. John Ames addresses his rambling meditations to a young son that he likely will not see grow up. This could be my grandfather, a Congregational minister, who lived in small towns in Iowa and Kansas, but who espoused both civil rights, liberation theology, and 5 purple stars.

Coming from a long line of ministers on my father's side, and a long line of Kansas settlers in my mother's side, this had a lot of resonance for me. This is a meditation on life, on inheritance, and on what we leave behind. John Ames addresses his rambling meditations to a young son that he likely will not see grow up. This could be my grandfather, a Congregational minister, who lived in small towns in Iowa and Kansas, but who espoused both civil rights, liberation theology, and ecumenism. Today, we think of the midwest as the hotbed of conservative Christianity, but I can testify to the fact that this sort of non-dogmatic, self-questioning and reflection is very much part of the Congregational inheritance. Here we have a man whose grandfather was a militant abolitionist, a father who was a pacifist and very much at odds with that. His older brother left home and came back an atheist. John loves life, but wrestles with what it means to live a good life. He is the obedient son, trying to come to terms with the loss of his first wife and child, finding love again late in life, and dealing with the fears and resentments triggered by the return of a fellow pastor's son and his namesake - a prodigal son in every sense of the word - who may come to take his place in his own young son's life when he dies. While this kind of stream of consciousness writing maybe isn't for everyone, it has its moments of beautiful insight and wisdom. Along the way, he does find that he can let go, he can forgive, he can find healing, and he can leave his love and his blessing to those around him. I will probably buy the book, because it invites dipping into it again and again.

Description: In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He "preached men into the Civil War," then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father--an ardent pacifist--and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be relics from the fight between the abolitionists and those settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the union as a slave state. And he tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend's wayward son. This is also the tale of another remarkable vision--not a corporeal vision of God but the vision of life as a wondrously strange creation. It tells how wisdom was forged in Ames's soul during his solitary life, and how history lives through generations, pervasively present even when betrayed and forgotten. ...more

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Nov 20, 2008 Melissa rated it really liked it

Shelves: constant-reader

An unhurried and introspective character study laced with some beautiful writing. The story unfolds as a series of journal entries meant to be read by the narrator's young son at some unknown future place and time. I enjoyed the sense of a specific place and its changes over the decades. Following John Ames's anguish and joys as he looks back on his life and relationships made me think of my own. The main character is a preacher and a son of preachers, and much of the book involves spiritual mus ...more

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Oct 31, 2019 Eric Wojcik rated it liked it

This simply did not work for me, and I have a capacity for philosophical or even theological fiction. I'm a bit surprised by how much of a miss this was, having read Housekeeping many years ago and finding that it stuck with me. But here she shears away what made that novel memorable -- a sense of place (sodden, cold, tangible) -- and cranks up what was weakest, which is character. In that previous novel we have shapes and outlines moving that become most real when interacting with their environ This simply did not work for me, and I have a capacity for philosophical or even theological fiction. I'm a bit surprised by how much of a miss this was, having read Housekeeping many years ago and finding that it stuck with me. But here she shears away what made that novel memorable -- a sense of place (sodden, cold, tangible) -- and cranks up what was weakest, which is character. In that previous novel we have shapes and outlines moving that become most real when interacting with their environment; here, we have no strong sense of place and the characters are stock. Here is a boy: I love the boy. Here is a wife much younger than I am: I look at her face.

But who are these people? I have little sense of them. What makes it worse is the presence of John Ames' best friend's son, Jack Boughton, who serves as a persistent, pestering foil to Ames' placid set of mind, and I could give a good goddamn about this guy. He turns out to be extremely important, far more important than the faceless masses this pastor has administered to throughout his life. A ne'er-do-well who nonetheless can speak on the icy godly/atheistic theories Ames bobbles about here and there, he continually reminded me of far more enveloping and fascinating characters from Faulkner. Especially with the race stuff.

Robinson really plugs into central casting in the American vein. The good-hearted, long-suffering preacher. Okay. He watches baseball. Fine. She even snakes an arm in to bring in John Brown and the history of abolitionism, although I'm not really sure what she's getting at, there.

I have trouble with this, especially, in the current era -- 2019 -- when the American myth is proving as well as it ever has to be a veneer over ridiculous lies. The easiness of the pastor-as-character, the cornpone wisdom of The Devil and Daniel Webster and the like, the foundational illusions of white America, make this character even more irritating, the fundamental fraud of religion, power, and storytelling in this country. I almost wish Ames' grandfather had been a Bushwacker, instead. Something to get closer to a truth rather than the easiness of just saying 'John Brown' a few times.

And then Robinson's easy slip into sentimentality. A six year old boy who will never know much of his father, who tries to leave a memo behind. Just heart-rending: can you feel it? (The plot to Michael Keaton's 1993 tear-jerker My Life.)

I was reminded time and again of John Williams' Stoner, which was unknown when this novel came out, but has been reestablished by the good folks at NYRB. That novel, from 1965, is filled with such quiet, ungreeted passion, is so tangible and real, so stirring with life and quietude, that there is simply no comparison. Sorry -- I am comparing after all.

I suppose I was never convinced by Ames. There is a homespun plainness to his voice, a dopiness, that suits him, but makes for zoning out. None of his anecdotes come to anything: we spend a few pages on a baseball game where literally nothing happens. There's a bizarre historical episode about a tunnel in a village collapsing. Nothing comes of these things, and I'm still convinced the novel has no idea what to do about race, just injects it to liven things up. And, most frustrating to me is the aleatory structure, as we ping gracelessly from one topic to the next in an old man ramble. I would have liked more shape. Instead we get Jack Boughton and more of him, because the book needed some edge or direction.

I'm disappointed that I am disappointed. And impressed that Robinson considered this bevy of characters interesting enough to go back to twice more. ...more

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