required reading

Earlier this month I read the second novel by Marilynne Robinson, called Gilead. Her first novel, Housekeeping, written 23 years earlier, was highly acclaimed  (it won the PEN/Hemingway prize for fiction, and was nominated for the Pulitzer). Her second novel, published a few years ago, received no less favourable a reaction.

This was a beautifully written book. I thought that perhaps I admired the calmness of spriti it provoked in me as much as the writing itself, and I tend to be suspicious of a purely emotional reaction to a book. But it has received many favourable reviews, from friends and authors I admire, as well as critics. Victoria, at Eve's Alexandria, says that it is not just a palliative: 'with such quiet, perfectly measured prose and apparently gentle thematics, it takes time to recognise its true open-eyed forcefulness', she comments. And Ali Smith reviewed it for the Guardian, concluding that it is :

A book about the damaged heart of America, it is part vibrant and part timeworn, a slow burn of a read with its "crepuscular" narrator, its repetitions, its careful languidity.

I'm at a loss to construct a blog entry about it, however - I don't have the time or energy to do the book (or any other book, at the moment) justice, but I couldn't let it pass without comment. It's the kind of novel that prompted me to read sentences and paragraphs aloud, in much the same way that, when you are out for a walk, you might drag your companion back a few paces so that they can appreciate a view that you think they have missed. Or you might try to make them see the extraordinary beauty of a photograph or a few seconds of a piece of music. So I will post an extract here, and allow you to read it for yourselves. It's not my favourite paragraph, but posting that part would make me far too vulnerable!

I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I’m old, and you said, I don’t think you’re old. And you put your hand in my hand and you said, You aren’t very old, as if that settled it. I told you you might have a very different life from mine, and from the life you’ve had with me, and that would be a wonderful thing, there are many ways to live a good life. And you said, Mama already told me that. And then you said, Don’t laugh! because you thought I was laughing at you. You reached up and put your fingers on my lips and gave me that look I never in my life saw on any other face besides your mother’s. It’s a kind of furious pride, very passionate and stern. I’m always a little surprised to find my eyebrows unsinged after I’ve suffered one of those looks. I will miss them.

It seems ridiculous to suppose the dead miss anything.

If you’re a grown man when you read this – it is my intention for this letter that you will read it then – I’ll have been gone a long time. I’ll know most of what there is to know about being dead, but I’ll probably keep it to myself. That seems to be the way of things.

I don’t know how many times people have asked me what death is like, sometimes when they were only an hour or two from finding out for themselves. Even when I was a very young man, people as old as I am now would ask me, hold on to my hands and look into my eyes with their old milky eyes, as if they knew I knew and they were going to make me tell them. I used to say it was like going home. We have no home in this world, I used to say, and then I’d walk back up the road to this old place and make myself a pot of coffee and a fried-egg sandwich and listen to the radio, when I got one, in the dark as often as not. Do you remember this house? I think you must, a little. I grew up in parsonages. I’ve lived in this one most of my life, and I’ve visited in a good many others, because my father’s friends and most of our relatives also lived in parsonages. And when I thought about it in those days, which wasn’t too often, I thought this was the worst of them all, the draftiest and the dreariest. Well, that was my state of mind at the time. It’s a perfectly good old house, but I was all alone in it then. And that made it seem strange to me. I didn’t feel very much at home in the world, that was a fact. Now I do.

And now they say my heart is failing. The doctor used the term ‘angina pectoris,’ which has a theological sound, like misericordia.Well, you expect these things at my age. My father died an old man, but his sisters didn’t live very long, really. So I can only be grateful. I do regret that I have almost nothing to leave you and your mother. A few old books no one else would want. I never made any money to speak of, and I never paid any attention to the money I had. It was the furthest thing from my mind that I’d be leaving a wife and child, believe me. I’d have been a better father if I’d known. I’d have set something by for you.