We see the consequences of misunderstandings we witness the joy of hope, the intense longing for peace, the power of forgiveness, and the lingering shadow of sins not forgotten. In Home, we enter Jack’s world, with all the hurts and fears and longings. Ames is protective of his friend Boughton and is suspicious of Jack’s intentions. In Gilead we see Jack from the perspective of Ames, a man who has known him all his life and is well aware of his shady past. While the two novels can stand alone, what makes them especially intriguing is the way characters are disclosed in the two books. The form of the novel is particularly suited to the exploration of the inner life of its characters, and Robinson reveals layer after layer of complex and conflicted emotions, assumptions, misunderstandings, and desires. There he helps his sister care for their father, and he quietly attempts to make peace with himself, his past, and his father. Jack, even as a child, never felt like he belonged, but hard years away have taken their toll, and nearly without hope he returns to the house of his youth. Jack Boughton returns to Gilead for the first time in twenty years, an answer to his father’s prayers, who has missed him dreadfully. Home treats the same period but does so from the perspective of Boughton’s house where Glory, Boughton’s youngest daughter, has returned home to Gilead to care for her ailing father. He recounts family stories, he speaks of his long friendship with Boughton, the Presbyterian minister, and he muses about the return of Boughton’s ne’er-do-well son, Jack, whose relative youth and natural charm is a gentle though persistent source of envy for Ames.

Gilead takes the form of a long and meandering letter written by Ames, an elderly and weakening Congregationalist minister who, having married late in life and fathered a son, takes pen in hand to write a letter to the boy whose adulthood he will not live to see. Like Wendell Berry, whose fiction explores different characters in his fictional Port William, Robinson’s two novels bring us into the intimate lives of two households, joined by friendship but strained by the imperfection of human understanding and the limits of love. Both are wonderful books, set in the same small Iowa town during the 1950’s. For some months I have been intending to read Home by Marilynne Robinson after enjoying her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead. One thing I enjoy about the Christmas break is the chance to sit back and read a novel.

Home marilynne robinson