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Boughton dismisses the first stirrings of the Civil Rights struggle as a temporary problem.The full extent of Jack's predicament is not revealed until the very end of the novel, and the outcome is uncertain.Some situations in this story seem to me somewhat contrived - quite obviously set up to make a specific point. Boughton has been "abroad" only once: to Minnesota, where to his consternation he found a lot of Lutherans. What has he been doing. Why is he coming back now.His ailing, widowed father, whose patience and forbearance seem almost saintly, does not question him.
The parochialism of the town is evident: other denominations are eyed with suspicion. All the sons and daughters of the Rev. I did not have that problem with "GILEAD". charming, reclusive Jack meets his father's attempts at reconciliation with polite evasiveness. Jack chafes at his father's futile attempts to start a "conversation" with him. There are probing questions concerning Presbyterian theology: predestination, "election", forgiveness, damnation; God's judgment and God's grace.
To these two damaged siblings, home is a refuge, but not a comfort.Gifted. Boughton dutifully return home to Gilead for Thanksgiving and Christmas, submit to the family traditions, and then quickly leave again to pursue their own lives. Lila Ames' simple belief in salvation carries more conviction than the high-flown arguments of the learned men.This domestic struggle proceeds against the background of 1950s political and social upheaval: the Civil Rights movement, the brinkmanship of John Foster Dulles ("that nice Presbyterian gentleman"), the beginning of the Cold War, the threat of the atom bomb; and, of course, the theology of Karl Barth. Ames, Boughton engages in heated arguments about theological dogma and politics. With his old friend, the Rev. Called upon to say Grace before a meal or to play a hymn on the piano, he feels that he is on trial, that his performance is being scrutinized and graded. Anglicans are viewed with outright animosity.There are no "colored" people in Gilead. Still, despite occasional rumblings of discontent, I found "HOME" an extraordinarily rich and rewarding novel.
All but one: Jack, the prodigal son, has not been heard from in twenty years. It falls to Glory to gradually draw him out, to slowly win his trust. The Rev. When he suddenly turns up in Gilead, he is surrounded by mystery: Where has he been all these years. Jack wonders how dogma can be reconciled with Scripture, and how the accident of birth affects destiny - but the answers he receives do not satisfy him. Buried resentments and old grief come bubbling to the surface. His sister Glory, who has come home after a failed relationship, regards him warily. Her own predicament - she has been deceived and abandoned by the man she loved - serves as a distorted reflection of Jack's misdeeds, and he begins to confide in her.He makes a brave attempt at overcoming his skepticism, but his father's certainties, the "Presbyterian probity and rectitude", get in the way.
That is what has always mystified me." And Glory reflects "Oh, it was the loneliness none of them could ever forget, that wry distance, as if there were injury for him in the fact that all of them were native to their life as he never could be."Families, forgiveness, home and connections. Glory's attempts to connect with her brother are as touching and real as his retreat into irony to hide his searing pain. Now 38, she has come home after an 8 year engagement and years of teaching school. Like her earlier book, Gilead, this is a book for the ages. If you do, you will find yourself totally in the world of this house, and these people. "What does it mean to come home."Marilynne Robinson poses the question and her book suggests how complex that wish may be.
Jack's father, now dying is cared for by the other central character, Glory, the youngest daughter. Their father says to Jack "What I'd like to know, is why you didn't love us. Jack, the prodigal son and favored child of the 8 children of a small town minister in Iowa in the mid 1950s returns home after a 20 year flight. Yet Robinson's gift, and it truly is a gift is that she takes the mundane and prosaic and enriches it with themes that are universal yet searingly specific to our lives today. He is an alcoholic and a self proclaimed thief, who has spent time in jail and seems to exist via " the kindness of strangers" as another book memorably posits, as well as odd jobs and kind women.This is a book that freely uses words like perdition and scoundrel and amazingly it sounds perfect.
Her fiancé has left with her money and hopes.If it all sounds grim and boring, don't buy the book.
Into their life comes Jack, the son who has been missing for twenty years: the criminal son, the alcoholic son, and the son the father worried about for all those years. It is a subtle language to the uninitiated, but as rich as any other and Robinson does it as well as I have seen it done. Home is a languid, terribly sad, story about the relationship between a dutiful daughter, a prodigal son and a dying father.
The book is set in the Midwest. Glory was often brought to tears by some event or comment. The father was a Midwestern protestant minister, and the family speaks to each other in the cadences of Midwestern reserve.
I have not read Marilynne Robinson's books, but after reading Home I intend to. Robinson has a wonderful knack for extracting the full communicative potential of small every-day actions allowing the reader to see the myriad of ways that family members speak and fail to speak to each other. She cries easily and would say about her tears, "It doesn't matter." I am a tough old man most of the time but often as I read, when a tear came to Glory's eyes a tear came to mine as well.
Glory, the daughter, hurt in love, has come home to care for her aging father in the town of Gilead. For one summer they try to understand each other, understand the nature of failure, and understand the bond of family.
B-O-R-I-N-G One word. I was given this book for Christmas by my husband and 7 year old son and was only able to finish it from the desire not to hurt thier feelings. The only good part about it was the feeling of accomplishment I had for sticking it out and making it through to the end.
It's easy to linger over each sentence, chiseled as it is from hard stone. But Robinson builds tension by slowly peeling away layers to reveal enduring truths about the themes that animate both Gilead novels: the often fraught relationships between fathers and sons, the stain of racial intolerance on American life, and the rewards of religious faith and its sometime stern demands. But in an essential way, Glory seems able to identify with Jack's struggles because of the way her life, too, has run aground in midstream. Describing the first time Jack takes the family car, on which he's lavished hours of attention, out for a drive, she writes, "Jack put his arm out the window, waving his hat like a visiting dignitary, backed into the street and gloated away, gentling the gleaming dirigible through the shadows of arching elm trees, light dropping on it through their leaves like confetti as it made its ceremonious passage." That same beauty of language is manifest in the intense level of observation Glory trains on Jack. Glory anxiously eyes her brother, her thoughts balanced between the fragile hope that he's capable of making a new start and her fear of the consequences of a relapse into his old ways. In the case of a writer less gifted and more commercially driven than Marilynne Robinson, it would be tempting to conclude that HOME, set in the mid-1950s in the same small Iowa town as her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel GILEAD, represented a mercenary attempt to capitalize on the well-deserved honors accorded that book.
Jack (the godson and namesake of Reverend Ames) is the family renegade, "so conspicuously not good as to cast a shadow over their household," a recovering alcoholic who has drifted through a life of petty crime and dead end jobs. While grounded in 1950s Middle America, the narrative exudes a feeling of timelessness, echoing biblical stories (Abraham and Ishmael, David and Absalom) sometimes explicitly discussed and other times only recognizable in the shadows.Marilynne Robinson's work is rewarding as much for the elegant simplicity of her prose as it is for the depth and power of her themes. Instead, she has accomplished the feat of reintroducing the characters of GILEAD from a fresh perspective, with a grace and wisdom that will deepen the understanding of readers of that novel and send those who first encounter her creations in this book back to its predecessor.Unlike GILEAD, narrated by the aging Congregationalist minister John Ames in a series of letters to his seven-year-old son, HOME is written in the third-person, the story told through the sensitive, observant eyes of Glory, the youngest of eight siblings in the family of Robert Boughton, the Presbyterian minister of Gilead and a close friend, if occasional religious antagonist, to Ames.Fresh from the failure of a lengthy relationship that damaged her both emotionally and financially, Glory, in her late 30s, has returned to the longtime family home, "this place of solemn and perpetual evening," to attend to her dying father. Reverend Boughton's pleasure at this son's return slowly seeps away as he and Jack realize they must struggle toward a reconciliation unlikely to occur.The narrative is tightly focused, almost microscopic in its attention to detail, and there's little in the way of dramatic action to move the plot forward. Whether she's describing "that estrangement of his gaze, that look of urgent calculation, of sharply attentive calm" or the way he appears to her "haggard and probationary, with little of his youth left to him except the wry elusiveness, secretiveness that he did in fact seem to wear on his skin," there's a surpassing tenderness in the depiction of one sibling's love for another.Explaining her decision, in a recent interview, to return to Gilead, Robinson said, "Those characters were just in my mind --- it was as if I could sense that there was another whole reality I could explore." There is, as she has demonstrated in this quietly brilliant work.--- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg ([.]. Into their lives returns her brother Jack, estranged from the family for some 20 years, after fleeing Gilead on the heels of fathering an illegitimate child who later dies.
"Neither one of us would be here if we weren't in some kind of --- difficulty," she concedes.The three Boughtons tentatively engage each other again in the family homestead, as Robinson expertly sketches what she calls "the intimacy of the ordinary." Jack tends to household chores, reclaiming a garden patch and restoring an ailing DeSoto.
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