Normally, I catch a train to work. I leave by the subway and cross Anzac Square past the bottle trees2 and the kikuyu grass.3 In Adelaide Street, in what, as an articled clerk, I called the Titles Office building, is a coffee shop called Extract. I order from Willeesee, the barista (and a supporter of the Waikato Chiefs) a flat white coffee in a mug and Turkish toast with honey.
It was over the pleasant ritual of Turkish toast and a mug of flat white, on 18 March of this year, that I read the final pages of Home. I had tears in my eyes as I did so.
I have been a devotee of The Great Gatsby as the novel with the best ending ever.4 I now think that Ms. Robinson’s novel, Home, is right up there with Mr. Fitzgerald’s great effort.
I have told the tale before how my wife’s birthday present to me of Home was a plot to make me read not just one novel but two since Home is a sister book to Gilead. Gilead was written and should be read first. So I had read and reviewed Gilead by the time I embarked upon Home.5
Gilead is a small town in the conservative mid-western state of Iowa. Both novels revolve around the lives of two families, the Presbyterian Boughtons and the Congregationalist Ames. The Reverend Ames and the Reverend Boughton are both old men during the time in which the two novels are set: in the period approaching the 1956 Presidential election. They are great old friends having known each other since school days. They were Ministers of their respective faiths in Gilead for most of their adult lives.
Gilead is a novel in the form of a letter from Reverend Ames directed to his young son, Robbie, a letter intended to be read long after Ames has died. The blurb on the inside of the front cover of Home states that that novel is Jack’s story, meaning John Ames Boughton: the problem child son of Reverend Boughton and godson and namesake sake of Reverend Ames.
It is true that Jack is a central figure in both novels. Gilead is concerned with Reverend Ames’ attempts to tell Robbie of the great joy he has experienced in meeting and marrying Robbie’s mother, the much younger Lila, late in life long after all hope of domestic bliss had been abandoned and the joys and fears associated with having a son whose adulthood Reverend Ames will not live to see.
But Jack is a central figure and Gilead reverberates with the suspicion held by Reverend Ames for his godson who has returned to his father’s home after an absence of more than two decades.
It is misleading, however, just to describe Home as Jack’s story. The omniscient narrator looks at the world through the eyes of Glory, Jack’s sister, who has also returned to her father’s rambling old house. She has none of the ne’er do well reputation of Jack. But Glory has been wounded by life, especially, by her rogue of a fiancé who has robbed her of much of her savings with requests for loans which were always squandered and who, finally, abandoned Glory and the promises that he had made to marry her. Glory finds herself trapped by circumstance in the world in which she lived her childhood. First, she must now care for her very frail father and, even afterwards, the expectations of her more successful siblings will be that she will stay in Gilead and mind the house that none of them could bear to see sold.
This perspective is central to the dramatic power of the novel. Jack’s story is told but Jack parts with his story, only to Glory and only reluctantly, as he partially overcomes a distrust of a world in which he has never felt comfortable. Jack is wounded by the world even more than Glory and his coping mechanisms are far more fragile.
Jack, who expects nothing but rejection, has come home to seek things from his father and from Reverend Ames. And, as Gilead had revealed, Reverend Ames was full of suspicion as Jack sought to build up the courage needed to make his requests. And, by preaching a sermon in which Jack’s greatest past misdeed is the “elephant in the church”, Reverend Ames inflicts a fresh set of wounds upon Jack. It is a great exercise in competing perceptions to re-read the same scene, as described in the two separate novels, from the different perspectives of the two men. For Jack, the sermon is a gut wrenching blow. Reverend Ames, on the other hand, through the irritableness of an old man, is only dimly aware of the great harm he has wrought.
From his father, Jack seeks two things. One is an understanding that, while Jack has not found faith, it is not from want of effort on his part. Jack also wants to discuss his own family, his wife, a respectable woman also from a religious family, and their child. But, as father and son watch the news on the newly installed television and see Negro demonstrators bashed by police in Montgomery, Alabama, Jack realises, from his father’s comments, that his father will never overcome his subconscious but deeply ingrained prejudice. Jack knows he will never be able to ask his father for assistance to bring his Afro-American wife and child to Gilead.
Marilynne Robinson has chosen an unusual setting to ponder the great American issue of race but she does it sublimely. She does it midst discussions of other important themes, including the working of relationships within families and between friends. She deals with the great issue of religious faith and its perpetual companion, religious doubt.
In Gilead, Reverend Ames’ discussions of his present necessitated the recounting of a generational past. The ending (of which I am so enamoured) in Home belongs to Glory. It contemplates an almost generational future.
Ms. Robinson reminds us that, though we interpret events on a daily basis in the here and now, true understanding is much more difficult. The distant past and the distant future are as important to the finding of meaning as anything else we can bring to bear.
Even if, like me, you read only a minimal ration of novels, I recommend that you read both Gilead and Home, in that order.6
Stephen Keim SC
Footnotes
- “Virago” is the name given to the first woman in the Latin bible. The name “Eve” was given later. Virago Press is an imprint of Little, Brown and only publishes books authored by women. It was established in 1973 to do exactly that. It was sold by its founders to Little, Brown in 1995. The logo of the imprint is the bitten apple.
- Brachychiton rupestris.
- Pennisetum clandestinum, a native of East Africa introduced to Australia for pastures, lawns and playing fields.
- This site places Gatsby at number 4 with William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom at number 1.
- Since writing the review of Gilead, I have discovered that President Obama has listed Gilead among his favourite books on his Facebook page.
- Although bound and printed in Australia by Griffin Press, Home does not seem to have an Australian publisher. On the Virago Press web site, the published price is 16.99 British pounds. However, you will have no difficulty purchasing the book at any decent Brisbane book shop.
