Home provides an
alternative point of view to much of the action in Marilynne Robinson’s
previous novel, Gilead. It is told
largely from the point of view of Glory, a woman approaching disappointed
middle-age, a former teacher cheated by her lover who has returned to the
stultifying family home in Gilead, Iowa in 1956. It is a story of death and
dying, actions and consequences, guilt and forgiveness, communication and
silence, redemption and doubt. It is an intensely serious, deeply thoughtful
book and, on the level of writing craft, an astonishing example of the power of
restraint in story-telling. It operates simultaneously as an analysis of
spirituality, of modern American society and, most brilliantly of all, of the
melancholy relationships of flawed families.
Home is told
loosely from Glory’s point of view of, although it is not her story and we are
not taken inside her mind. The use of third person in this novel – both
Robinson’s previous novels are first person narratives – is perfect. It allows
Robinson the distance that is required to explicate what the characters
themselves can barely understand, and it allows that explication to be only
partial but, ironically, through that partialness, it still permits us to see
more than the poor characters ever could. This novel simply could not have been
written in the first person; it wouldn’t work.
Glory is the daughter of the dying Presbyterian minister
Robert Boughton, and the sister of John Ames Boughton, known as Jack. The novel
begins with Glory returning to the family home after being abandoned by her
fiance. There are intimations that Jack, too, after years of silence, now
wishes to make a difficult return. Jack is a man with a past (fully explained
in Gilead, but only partially
revealed here), the family black sheep who disappeared twenty years before,
after a childhood of dissipation ended in fathering a child to a local girl.
All connection was subsequently lost – he even missed his mother’s funeral –
although his father never ceased praying for his wellbeing and return. After
some false starts, Jack finally arrives home hung-over, apparently an
alcoholic, seemingly desperate but uncommunicative, and the novel revolves
around the subsequent interplay between father, daughter and son.
The secrets within families, the stories that dare not be
told, the emotions that must remain checked, the opinions unaired, these are
the remarkable moments which inform Home.
This is a small-scale drama which reveals large-scale truths. Its damaged
protagonists, each silenced by memories of their own and each other’s scarred
pasts, circle around one another, seeing in each other a desperate need. But
they are barely able to help themselves, far less offer anything concrete, any
genuine support to their family. Time and again, they rebuff one another; given
the options of release or pain, forgiveness or judgement, they choose to extend
their private pain even although that pain must, inevitably, spill over and
harm those they love and care about
but cannot find a way to care for. At
the heart of it is misunderstanding, and an inability – or refusal? – to
attempt to understand from another’s perspective. For anyone brought up within
such a stark Calvinist milieu it is excruciatingly difficult to read. For
anyone else it must be completely alien. Near the end, the dying father says to
his son, apologising for his behaviour towards him, ‘I promised myself a
thousand times, if you came home you would never hear a word of rebuke from me.
No matter what.’ Such confessions do not come easily to men like Boughton, they
speak of a deep truth; but even now, when this confession of weakness – failure
– is finally made, this promise of connection between kin, the opportunity is
lost. ‘I don’t mind,’ Jack tells his father. ‘I deserve rebuke.’ And so father
and son remain mysteries to one another. Boughton queries why his son always
greets him with an impersonal ‘sir’ but, late in the novel, when Jack does call
him “dad”, he reacts:
“Don’t call me that.”
“Sorry.”
“I don’t like it at all. Dad.
It sounds ridiculous. It’s not even a word.”
“I’ll never use it again.”
Glory and Jack are two of eight children. The other six
have all, in their ways, become successes. Glory and Jack, in their ways, are
failures. For Glory, there is something inevitable about this:
[they] were the unexceptional
children, she thought – slighted, overlooked. There was no truth in this
notion. Jack was exceptional in every way he could be, including, of course,
truancy and misfeasance, and yet he managed to get by on the cleverness
teachers always praised by saying “if only he would put it to some use.” As for
herself, she was so conscientious that none of her A’s and A-pluses had to be
accounted for otherwise than as the reward of diligence. She was good in the
fullest and narrowest sense of the word as it applied to female children. And
she had blossomed into exactly the sort of adult her childhood predicted. Ah
well.
This is the first of two uses of “Ah well” in the novel,
and it is clear that, in their almost bashful informality, they represent key
moments. For Glory, this is the acceptance that the accumulation of disappointment
she has known in her thirty-eight years has been, is and will continue to be
inevitable. This is her, and this is her lot. Had she been a boy she might have
entered the ministry. As a girl, bright, conscientious, caring, naïve,
irresolute, she is resigned to being the one charged with maintaining the
family house after her father has died, the core to which the family – the
others – may return should or when they choose. She has no future, other than
as a means of preserving the family’s history, the curator of the ghosts of the
past. It is a desperate submission of a woman’s vitality, heartbreaking.
The second “Ah well” comes late in the novel, and also
comes from the perspective of Glory, but this time referring to her father:
He loved to reflect on the
fact that grace was never singular in its effects, as now, when he could please
his son by forgiving his friend [Ames]. “That is why it is called a Spirit,” he
said. “The word in Hebrew also means wind. ‘The Spirit of God brooded on the
face of the deep.’ It is a sort of enveloping atmosphere.” Her father was
always so struck by his insights that it was impossible for him to tell those
specific to the moment from those on which he had preached any number of times.
It had made him a little less sensitive than he ought to have been to the risk
of repeating himself. Ah well.
The significance of this throwaway remark, this shrug of
a sentence, should not be underestimated. This is not a novel, and these are
not characters, where failings are easily forgiven or even understood. If
forgiveness and judgement are twin prongs on which the Christian faith is
built, in Calvinist Christianity the latter has the greatest weight. Boughton’s
promise not to rebuke his son is lost. When money disappears in Gilead he
immediately believes his son to be the thief and seeks to make reparation:
this, a well-intentioned but thoughtless response, a failure to observe the man
in front of him other than through the prism of the boy he had been twenty
years before, seals the divisions which have always existed, creating a vacuum
across which father and son have no means of communicating. Glory, with her
simple “Ah well”, discerns another such flaw in her father and dismisses it. Ah
well.
The fourth character in the novel is Reverend John Ames,
a Congregationalist minister and long-time friend and theological sparring
partner of Boughton, after whom Jack is named. Ames is the central character of
Gilead, which relates the same basic
story as Home but does so on a more
theological level. And it is largely through Ames that the telescoped nature of
Home’s analysis of familial crisis is
broadened into a wider study of spirituality, an analysis of faith and trust,
hope, redemption. Ames, also dying, is mistrustful of Jack, fearful that he
will once again bring pain upon his father and suspicious of his motivations. A
manifestly good man, but afflicted by a tendency to judge in absolutes, he is
responsible for the novel’s most damaging event, when Jack, seeking absolution
and aiming to proclaim publicly his belief in God, attends Ames’s Sunday
service, only for the old man to extemporise a sermon on guilt which is
clearly, shamefully aimed directly at Jack. Jack, one feels, would inevitably
have broken before the novel’s conclusion, but this rebuff entirely ensures his
failure. The balance of forgiveness and judgement tilts again towards
judgement. The capacity to change, to shift long-established beliefs, is
rendered impossibly hard for men in whom rigid sense of duty and propriety is
all. Boughton, similarly, is unshakeable in his faith, blind to its failings.
He tells Jack:
“I hate to think that any
trouble might have come to you because your father was a tight-fisted old
Scotsman!”
“I can reassure you on that
point, sir.”
“Good. That’s fine. But there
is that other vice of the Scots, you know. Drink.”
Jack smiled. “So I
understand.”
“It is a plague amnong them,
my grandmother said. They have no defense against it. She said she had seen
many a good man wholly destroyed but it.”
This is a remarkable passage. Drink is, indeed a curse of
the Scots, and it is, specifically, the curse of the alcoholic Jack. And yet,
in this one-dimensional caricature of their shared Scots heritage, Boughton
misses the one, overwhelming inherited characteristic that has brought their
family to this pass: their Calvinist need to judge, to weigh the measure of
forgiveness on the unforgiving and intolerant scale of religious rightness.
Robinson, a committed Congregationalist herself, is impressive in the way she
allows the faults of the Congregationalist Ames and Presbyterian Boughton to
stand in such stark relief.
Late in the drafting of Moby-Dick, Herman Melville, upset
and bemused by the lack of success of his career, wrote into the beginning of
the novel a key passage in which Father Mapple speaks to the men before they
embark on their whaling voyage, in a church surrounded by memorials to their
dead predecessors, men killed or lost in action. It is a lengthy oration, brilliant
and unifying, drawing together a room of individuals into a single
congregation. In it, Melville released some of his frustrations at the lack of
response his novels were eliciting from his own congregation of readers. Father
Mapple succeeded where Melville, despite his best efforts, was failing. He was
using words as a tool to draw people into a greater consciousness. Ames and
Boughton, fine ministers both, have a similar ability to use the power of words
to shape an audience, draw it into their world view. And Robinson, too, another
genius with words, allows herself her pulpit moments but this is no blinkered,
didactic sermonising. Her characters’ flaws are all too evident.
Robinson understands human failings and foibles. None of
her characters are irredeemably bad, none saintly in their goodness. The
ostensible rotten apple is clearly in search of understanding, both his
understanding of others and others of him; while the pair of dying ministers
struggle to forgive or forget or to ascribe to Jack anything other than
ill-intent or recidivism.
Meanwhile, the true sin occurs outside the family, in the
community of Gilead itself. The novel is set in 1956, the year of the
Montgomery bus boycott, the start of the Civil Rights movement in America.
Civil rights is not a subject old Boughton considers to be of any import:
whenever Jack raises the subject it is rebuffed. The ‘colored’ people are
creating the trouble by themselves, his father says. ‘It will soon be
forgotten.’ There is no problem in Gilead, he insists. Perhaps not, but the
only black church in town was burned to the ground, in what Ames describes as a
‘little nuisance fire’, many years before, since when no black families have
lived there. Racism can just as easily be discerned by absence. This is the third
great theme of Robinson’s novel, the structure of American society, and it is
deftly handled. It is through Jack, the flawed individual, that it is
presented, time and again. A plot development brings it to the fore as the
novel reaches its conclusion, and we are left with the message that secular
matters, as well as spiritual, are not as clearly beneficent in the sleepy town
of Gilead as its aged and paternalistic ministers may care to believe.
Home is
undoubtedly a melancholy novel. It’s characters are damaged people. It offers
no major hope of transformation, only small glimmers. Glory, for example,
despite her crushing emotional reticence, does achieve a breakthrough, a
glimmer of understanding. She and Jack finally come closer – not close, but closer.
It is a small triumph in a book where small triumphs are not to be overlooked.
Near the end, there is one paragraph which is haunting in its perfection.
Boughton is rapidly approaching death, his mind wandering; Jack is preparing to
leave; Glory is preparing to fulfil her role as custodian:
Glory was aware suddenly that
the weariness of the night and day had overwhelmed her, and her hope of
comforting had not had anything to do with the way things really happen in the
world. Her father was crouched in his chair, with this chin almost in his
plate, drowsing and speaking from what she could only hope was a dream, and her
brother was withdrawing into utter resignation, as if the old incandenscence
had consumed him before it flickered out. But he brought her a tea towel for
her tears, and then he helped his father to his room.
Everything is contained within that brief paragraph. It
is a beautiful study of loss and connection. It leaves nothing else to be said.
