Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson

I confess I'm the type of reader who tends to stay away from best-seller lists. But I am so thankful that a friend suggested a joint book review--via our blogs--on Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead, which won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. I soon found that my anticipated problem of not coming up with enough to write about was completely reversed.

The narrator's insights come from Reverend John Ames's end-of-life reflections, wise but often humanly uncertain, on his roles as father, husband, and son--all illuminated by his vocation as a pastor. The narrative takes the form of Rev. Ames’s letter to his seven-year-old son, which he hopes will serve as some kind of substitute for fatherly advice once a rapidly degenerative heart condition overtakes him. The foremost source for Ames’s introspective commentary is his refreshing--dare I say, Puritan-like--view of ordinary life as sanctified. Even at age 79, "remarkable" is one of his favorite words to describe the wonders of existence. Easily one of my favorite lines in the novel, this instance captures it well: "Cataract that this world is, it is remarkable to consider what does abide in it." Simply put, Ames is obsessed with the revelation of eternity and divinity in mundane and "mere" human existence.

Though he warns his son, "you must not judge what I know by what I find words for," Gilead is a didactic memoir whose every word is deliberate and filled with precise, vivid meaning; the form of a letter from father to son highlights the breathtaking intimacy of verbal communication. In fact, more than the richness of the thematic developments, and more than the profoundness of potentially trite theological considerations that are weaved gracefully into the narrative, Robinson produces a thoroughly realistic, yet somehow remarkably heavenly-minded account of the joys and difficulties that redeemed humans have with loving as they have been loved.