Why This Book: Chosen by my literature reading group because 1. we have been on a great run of Pulitzer Prize winners, 2. it’s relatively short, and we were looking for something good AND short.

Summary in 3 sentences: Reverend John Ames is in his mid seventies and has a severe heart condition which he knows will kill him soon.  He knows he won’t be there to see his young son grow into maturity, so this book is the journal he writes as a letter to his son to share his thoughts about his own life and life in general for him to read when he is an adult.   In this letter/journal, we learn of Ames struggles to be a good man and live up to his and his community’s expectations of him, of his struggles with his faith, family and values, and of the wisdom of a life well lived which has helped him to appreciate life’s small pleasures and to accept what comes his way.

My impressions: A very powerful book.  Reverend John Ames is a thoughtful, well-read, and very self-aware man in his mid 70s who knows that his heart is very weak, he hasn’t much time left.  He intends for  his son to read the words he is writing when he matures into adulthood many years later.

John Ames is a congregationalist minister and his letter to his son reflects his struggles to understand and reconcile his very liberal and non-traditional  theology with the world he lives in.  While he is very devoted to his faith and Christianity, he is also very willing to question and challenge his own views and he does in his letter to his son.    Throughout his life he preached and sought to live as a spiritual example to his congregation, and  he shares with his son that he never quite lived up to his own standards.

Ames is writing this letter in the 1950s, in Gilead, Iowa, where he grew up and lived his whole life.  The town is small and not very affluent, was founded as a place for abolitionists to aid  runaway slaves on the underground railroad. Ames’ grandfather was a  zealous abolitionist, supported John Brown in his Kansas campaign prior to the Harper’s Ferry disaster. The abolitionist background of his family and the town of Gilead is a recurring theme in the book.   Ames’ very religious and righteous grandfather was a central figure in his upbringing.

Three characters appear regularly in Ames’s letter to his son:  Lila, Ames’ wife and his son’s mother;  Reverend Robert Boughton, Ames best friend and a minister in the Presbyterian church in Gilead;  and Reverend Boughton’s son named for Ames himself, John Ames Boughton, known as Jack.  They are only mentioned in Ames’ journal-letter to his son and he shares brief vignettes about each of them, but we don’t get to know them very well.   Marilynn Robinson resolves this shortcoming by writing separate novels that fill in the gaps: Her novel Home is about the Boughton family, and was named by the Washington Post as one of the best books of the year for 2008.  Her novel  Lila is about the life of  John Ames wife prior to and during her marriage to  John Ames and won the 2014 National Book Critics Award.

One theme that Ames returns to throughout his narrative is his preoccupation with his relationship to his namesake John Ames  Boughton, the troubled adult son of his best friend.  There are unresolved tensions between the two, that both of them awkwardly seek to resolve.  Throughout the book we get more background on Jack Boughton and Ames’ relationship with him.

At the end of the book we are brought back to Ames special relationship to the town of Gilead, its people and and the life he has lived and savored there.   The joy he has found in the simple town of Gilead is part of the joy he has learned to find in so many small and on first blush, insignificant activities.  And  we get a sense for why  “Gilead” is indeed a fitting title for this book.

I’ll finish wth what my friend Gary wrote after finishing the book:

“It was difficult for me to read the last few pages of “Gilead” because of my farewell tears to a good and wise friend.  The book brings to mind Ecclesiates, the parables of the prodigal son, the lost coin, and the lost sheep; Henri Nouwen’s essay about Rembrandt’s Prodigal Son, and a bit of Oedipus Rex.

Above all else this is a love story–God’s love for his creation, people’s refection of God’s love by loving and forgiving each other, and the centrality of the commandment for children to honor their parents as the connecting tissue between God and man. (A corollary must be for parents to honor their children.)

 “Gilead” is an essay on many of the ineffable and eternal topics such as the existence of God, the nature of sin, the power of loneliness, the need for sound relationships with people and God, the vast range of emotions brought on by love, our power to hurt and heal people we love; the efficacy and justice of wars between the Civil War and WW II, and our never ending sin of slavery.

What I missed:  Reverend John Ames never mentions in all his narrative about his life, any struggles with his sexuality. This strikes me as odd, from a man whose first wife died when he was in his early 20s and who doesn’t marry again, nor apparently have any lovers, until he meets and marries Lila in his late 60s.   John Ames makes no references, discretely nor obliquely, to missing physical intimacy with women, nor to that as part of his relationship with his own wife – the mother of his son – apart from the obvious implication of what led to the conception and birth of his son.  This is either a misunderstanding by Marilynne Robinson of men, or a deliberate omission by a woman author writing from a man’s perspective.  While I found the spiritual and intellectual dimensions of this book inspiring, thought provoking, and powerful,  I did feel that  Ames’ story deserved a bit more testosterone.

For another interesting perspective on growing old, I recommend an article from the New Yorker Magazine written by a 93 year old man (he’s now 96 as of November 2016, and is still alive and writing!)  The article is entitled This Old Man. 

A few quotes:

<referring to his grandfather> When someone remarked in his hearing that he had lost an eye in the Civil War, he said, “I prefer to remember that I have kept one.”

He was just afire with old certainties, and he couldn’t bear all the patience that was required of him by the peace and by the aging of his body and by the forgetfulness that had settled over everything.  He thought we should all be living at a dead run.  I don’t say he was wrong.  That would be like contradicting John the Baptist.  32

<after an unexpected hardship, his mother>…closed one eye and looked at me and said, “I know there is blessing in this somewhere.”  35

To be useful was the best thing the old men ever hoped for themselves, and to be aimless was their worst fear.  49

It was the most natural think in the world that my grandfather’s grave would look like a place where someone had tried to smother a fire.  50

Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience. That metaphor has always interested me, because it makes us artists of our behavior, and the reaction of God to us might be thought of as aesthetic rather than morally judgmental in the ordinary sense. 124

If you think how a thing we call a stone differs from a thing we call a dream – the degrees of unlikeness within the reality we know are very extreme…143

Your mother wanted to name the cat Feuerbach, but you insisted on Soapy. 143

I would advise you against defensiveness on principle. It precludes the best eventualities along with the worst.  154

To say a thief is a brother man and beloved of God is true. To say therefore a thief is not a thief is an error.  156

Sinners are not all dishonorable people, not by any means.  156

I wish I could leave you certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am. Well, but again, this life has its own mortal loveliness…A moment is such slight thing, I mean, that its abiding is almost a gracious reprieve.  162

Don’t look for proofs .. because they claim for God a place within our conceptual grasp….It was Coleridge who said Christianity is a life, not a doctrine….179

He could knock me down the stairs and I would have worked out the theology for forgiving him before I reached the bottom.  But if he harmed you in the slightest way, I’m afraid theology would fail me.  190

We fly forgotten as a dream, certainly, leaving the forgetful world behind us to trample and mar and misplace everything we have ever cared for. That is just the way of it, and it is remarkable.  191

Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the runs of any number of preceding civilizations…197

You can spend forty years teaching people to be awake to the fact of mystery and then some fellow with no more theological sense than a jackrabbit gets himself a radio ministry and all your work is forgotten. 208

The Lord absolutely transcends any understanding I have of Him, which makes loyalty to Him a different thing from loyalty to whatever customs and doctrines and memories I happen to associate with Him.  235

There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient. 243

It has seemed to me sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation and it turns to radiance – for a moment or a year or the span of a life.   And then it sinks back into itself again and to look at it no one would know it had anything to do with fire, or light.   245

Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration.  You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see.  Only, who could have the courage to see it? 245