A review by kylegarvey
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

emotional reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.0

 Narrated quaintly just as Housekeeping was, Robinson's follow-up came almost a quarter-century later. Interesting I guess how it's so delicate, but I'm afraid I can't relate to very much at all: Christianity the least of all our crazy leaps. Sorry to throw down a stubborn, impassable speed bump so soon, ha, but I really took that Obama recommendation to heart. Frankly, things like "how deeply I regret any sadness you have suffered and how grateful I am in anticipation of any good you have enjoyed" (34) are few and far between. 

 

Why does everything need to be a ponderous theological debate, nearly impenetrable to anyone who isn't already hard-core on the right side? Haha. It's with regret, and in only the most casually tossed-off and barely published words, that that kind of prose should ever be signed off by a writer, I believe. 

 

Some things acceptable ("the strangest thing about this life, about being in the ministry. People change the subject when they see you coming. And then sometimes those very same people come into your study and tell you the most remarkable things. There’s a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that" (17), "I can’t tell you, though, how I felt, walking along beside him that night, along that rutted road, through that empty world—what a sweet strength I felt, in him, and in myself, and all around us" (71), "I was in on the secret, too—implicated without knowing what I was implicated in. Well, that’s the human condition, I suppose" (113))… 

 

…but a lot not ("There is a tendency among some religious people even to invite ridicule and to bring down on themselves an intellectual contempt which seems to me in some cases justified. Nevertheless" (203) ['Nevertheless' like you disagree? Well, I must close my quotation of you there then.], "Though I must say all this has given me a new glimpse of the ongoingness of the world. 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" (250), "I am one of those righteous for whom the rejoicing in heaven will be comparatively restrained. And that’s all right. There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal" (306)) 

 

…and even a heathen could recognize acceptability without really accepting it, just hypothetically: "You are free to act by your own lights. You are freed at the same time of the impulse to hate or resent that person. He would probably laugh at the thought that the Lord sent him to you for your benefit (and his), but that is the perfection of the disguise, his own ignorance of it" (165) and then "Well, I can imagine him beyond the world, looking back at me with an amazement of realization -- 'This is why we have lived this life!' There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient" (312). 

 

Though, abstracted around the ethics of a dimly pious old white man, what have we? Really, a book? Mentioning vaguely some interracial love, but persisting in theology anyway, it's ok. No really, it's ok: two fifths? Two fifths.