Home by Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson’s Home is the second book in the Gilead Quartet. Although the books can be read independently, when read together each one expands, deepens and re-layers family events and relationships, giving greater perspective on the various understandings and misunderstandings.  As Rachel Sykes describes in her essay on the narrative sequence: 

“The ingenuity of the Gilead novels is therefore to deepen the reader’s understanding of its characters by occupying one shared fictional location and, to a lesser extent, the same narrative moment in 1956. In this way, I also argue that Robinson’s novels are better conceived as partner, parallel, or simultaneous fictions—what Rowan Williams calls “interrelated” narratives or what Sarah Churchwell describes as “companion” or “sibling” texts—than as a chronologically linear series or trilogy.”

Rachel Sykes

The novel focuses on Jack and Glory’s experience of ‘home’, as they come to terms with their respective life paths, wounds, hurts and hopes, all of which are played out against the backdrop of an ageing father and a house packed with childhood memories. Gradually, the polite facade of a minister’s family slips to reveal the underlying conflicts which centre most especially around Jack. Prodigal son, or suffering servant? The most beloved of Rev. Boughton’s eight children, Jack embodies conflictual action and yet is the one most reflective and questioning of Boughton family values, in particular the suggestion of hypocrisy in their espousal of Christian love. 

Home  tenderly describes, without judgement, the conflict between care for others and our need for personal integrity and dignity; the struggle to negotiate the weight of the past and one’s own disappointments while finding a new path into the future. 

“There is a saying that to understand is to forgive, but that is an error, so Papa used to say. You must forgive in order to understand. Until you forgive, you defend yourself against the possibility of understanding.” 

Marilynne Robinson, Home

The beauty in Robinson’s writing lies in her ability to find meaning in the ordinary; grace in the everyday. She has said of the theologian Calvin that he has a great sense of beauty as the signature of the divine, but this insight of beauty leads both to fall and resurrection: 

 “If someone in some sense lives a life that we can perceive as beautiful its own way, that is something that suggests grace, even if by a strict moral standard … they might seem to fail.” 

Marilynne Robinson, God and Calvin

In The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought the author writes:

“I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes. I think the concept of transcendence is based on a misreading of creation. With all respect to heaven, the scene of miracle is here, among us.”

Marilynne Robinson

SALON DETAILS

• Facilitated by Toby Brothers & Nicky von Fraunhofer
• Virtual (via Zoom), Thursday evenings, 5-7.00 pm (UK time)
• £150 for five meeting study, 18, 25 May, 1, 8, 15 June 2023
• Recommended edition: Home by Marilynne Robinson, Virago, ISBN-13: 9781844085507