April 25, 2006
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
At the train station in Malmö, Sweden, I picked up the Virago paperback edition of Gilead, Marilyn Robinson's "demanding, grave, and lucid" 2004 novel. (It was published by FSG in the US.) There was a twenty-three-year gap between this book and Housekeeping, her 1981 debut, and, as many commentators have noted, it was worth the wait. The novel won the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It was reviewed favorably at the New York Times (where it was one of the paper's ten best books of the year), the Village Voice, the Washington Post, the New York Review of Books, New York, Slate, the London Review of Books, The Guardian, and elsewhere. This is one case where I think you can believe the hype.
Neither book's narrative recommends itself to me, yet the deliberative tone Robinson strikes perfectly counters her more lyrical passages, and I found myself connecting emotionally to the main characters of each. To use a phrase borrowed from Ann Patchett, a former student at Iowa who reviewed the newer novel for the New York Observer, Robinson's characters "luxuriate in time," living the reflective lives we wish we could enjoy. Thankfully, an added benefit of Gilead, little remarked upon by the book's many reviewers, is that its form—a letter written by the dying, seventy-six-year-old Reverend John Ames to his young son—invites repeated readings; once you've finished the book and know the relationships between its eight or ten main characters, the one-to-three-page, diarylike entries are perfect for savoring individually.
After completing Gilead, I sought further commentary from Robinson, and found a lot on the internet. Beyond her brief faculty profile at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, there are a number of interviews, including one at The Atlantic, one at the LA Weekly, and one at Powells.com. There are also audio interviews from two NPR programs (one, two).