Home: A Novel [Paperback]

Marilynne Robinson (Author)

Book Description

Release date: September 1, 2009

WINNER OF THE ORANGE PRIZE 2009
A 2008 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST

WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE
A New York Times Bestseller

A Washington Post Best Book of the Year

A Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year

A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year

Hailed as "incandescent," "magnificent," and "a literary miracle" (Entertainment Weekly), hundreds of thousands of readers were enthralled by Marilynne Robinson's Gilead. Now Robinson returns with a brilliantly imagined retelling of the prodigal son parable, set at the same moment and in the same Iowa town as Gilead. The Reverend Boughton's hell-raising son, Jack, has come home after twenty years away. Artful and devious in his youth, now an alcoholic carrying two decades worth of secrets, he is perpetually at odds with his traditionalist father, though he remains his most beloved child. As Jack tries to make peace with his father, he begins to forge an intense bond with his sister Glory, herself returning home with a broken heart and turbulent past. Home is a luminous and healing book about families, family secrets, and faith from one of America's most beloved and acclaimed authors.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best of the Month, September 2008: "What does it mean to come home?" In one way or another, every character in Home is searching for that answer. Glory Boughton, now 38 and lovelorn, has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father. Her wayward brother Jack also finds his way back, though his is an uneasy homecoming, reverberating with the scandal that drove him away twenty years earlier. Glory and Jack unravel their stories slowly, speaking to each other more in movements than in words--a careful glance here, a chair pulled out from the table there--against a domestic backdrop so richly imagined you may be fooled into believing their house is your own. Meanwhile, their father, whose ebullient love for his children is a welcome counterpoint to Glory and Jack's conflicted emotions, experiences his own kind of reckoning as he yearns to understand his troubled son. There is a simplicity to this story that belies the complexity of its characters--they are bound together by a profound capacity for love and by an equally powerful sense of private conviction that tries the ties that bind, but never breaks them. It's a delicate sort of tension that you think would resist exposition--and in fact these characters seem to want nothing more than, as Glory says, to treat "one another's deceptions like truth"--but Marilynne Robinson's fine, tender prose imbues this family's secrets with an overwhelming grace. --Anne Bartholomew

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Robinson's beautiful new novel, a companion piece to her Pulitzer Prize–winning Gilead, is an elegant variation on the parable of the prodigal son's return. The son is Jack Boughton, one of the eight children of Robert Boughton, the former Gilead, Iowa, pastor, who now, in 1957, is a widowed and dying man. Jack returns home shortly after his sister, 38-year-old Glory, moves in to nurse their father, and it is through Glory's eyes that we see Jack's drama unfold. When Glory last laid eyes on Jack, she was 16, and he was leaving Gilead with a reputation as a thief and a scoundrel, having just gotten an underage girl pregnant. By his account, he'd since lived as a vagrant, drunk and jailbird until he fell in with a woman named Della in St. Louis. By degrees, Jack and Glory bond while taking care of their father, but when Jack's letters to Della are returned unopened, Glory has to deal with Jack's relapse into bad habits and the effect it has on their father. In giving an ancient drama of grace and perdition such a strong domestic setup, Robinson stakes a fierce claim to a divine recognition behind the rituals of home. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Picador; Reprint edition (September 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312428545
• ISBN-13: 978-0312428549
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (145 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #101,151 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Marilynne Robinson is the author of the bestselling novels Home, Gilead (winner of the Pulitzer Prize), Housekeeping, and two books of nonfiction, Mother Country and The Death of Adam. She teaches at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

330 of 342 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Heart-wrenching, haunting, beautiful... September 6, 2008

By D. Kanigan VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This story is set in the 1950's in a small rural town in Iowa (Gilead). Robert Boughton, a retired and aging minister, is in poor health. Glory Boughton, 38, his youngest daughter, has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father and to regroup after the failure of a longstanding relationship and the evaporation of her dreams of home, marriage and children.

"I am 38 years old, she would say to herself as she tidied up after supper. I have a master's degree. I taught high school English for 13 years. I was a good teacher. What have I done with my life? What has become of it? It is as if I had a dream of adult life and woke up from it, still here in my parents' house."

Jack Broughton, his father's most beloved son, also returns home after a twenty-year disappearance - looking for peace, forgiveness, a refuge and reconciliation - with his Father, his family and a community which he ran from after earning a reputation as a thief and a scoundrel.

"Jack was exceptional in every way he could be, including of course, truancy and misfeasance."

Glory and Jack unravel their personal histories slowly - one slight pull at a time on a large ball of string. The simplicity of the story is tied with tension, heartwarming and difficult memories, conflicted emotions and most of all - with love - among family members and Father to son. Glory and Jack slowly build a relationship while caring for their Father.

The story is anchored around Jack and his relationship with his Father - a kind, graceful, forgiving man - who is elated to have his son home to settle his longstanding worries and concerns - yet other concerns have now surfaced - including how to deal with Jack's restlessness, his troubling "behaviors" - and finally his concern over Jack leaving again and being out of reach of help.

"I thanked God for him every day of his life, no matter how much grief, how much sorrow - and at the end of it all there is only more grief, more sorrow, and his life will go on that way, no help for it now. You see something beautiful in a child, and you almost live for it, you feel as though you would die for it, but it isn't yours to keep or protect. And if the child becomes a man who has no respect for himself, it's just destroyed till you can hardly remember what it was - it's like watching a child die in your arms. (He looked at Jack.) Which I have done."

My assessment:

1) One of the best books I have read. A sad but hauntingly beautiful book (or perhaps better described as a work of art) by a writer who is in a professional class of her own. I couldn't put it down.

2) Beautiful, crystal clear images and plain spoken prose.

"And there was an oak tree in front of the house, much older than the neighborhood or the town, which made rubble of the pavement at its foot and flung its imponderable branches out over the road and across the yard, branches whose girth were greater than the trunk of any ordinary tree. There was a torsion in its body that made it look like a giant dervish to them. Their father said if they could see as God can, in geological time, they would see it leap out of the ground and turn in the sun and spread its arms and bask in the joys of being an oak tree in Iowa."

3) Not for everyone. Slow Pace. Thin Plot. Deep Character insights.

If you are looking for in-your-face suspense thriller, murder mysteries, car crashes, this book won't be for you. This is quiet, gentle, artful prose that carries your interest like a gentle breeze on a warm summer day. You can feel your heart beat slow as you turn the pages - yet she pulls you along a slow moving river, wanting to see what's around the next bend - and often times it is a peek into what the characters think and feel.

4) Feels like the application of a soothing balm over a sore that won't heal.

Novel highlights the imperfections of man. The beauty, strength and pain of unconditional love. The binds of family and friends. How belief and doubt affect our daily lives. How leading the simplest life can be touched by grace, wonder and heart ache.

This is a genius work by a master craftsperson. I was sorry for the story to come to an end.

115 of 121 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Prodigal at Home September 25, 2008

By Roger Brunyate TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

How simple it seems, that story of the Prodigal Son! The wanderer returns; his joyful father falls on his shoulder and orders the fatted calf to be killed; the stay-at-home sibling is resentful for a while, but presumably learns to deal with it. For the story stops there. There is no tomorrow. The Bible doesn't ask what happens in the weeks and months after that. Is the family happily reunited? Does the Prodigal never yearn to be off again? Where does life go from here? These are some of the many questions posed by Marilynne Robinson in her latest novel, HOME, a sister work to her Pulitzer Prize-winning GILEAD.

HOME is not a sequel to GILEAD, but a parallel novel, taking place in the same town (Gilead, Iowa), at exactly the same time (1956), and involving many of the same characters. Readers of the earlier novel will recall that the town has two elderly preachers, John Ames and Robert Boughton, close friends since childhood. In HOME, the action shifts from Ames' house to that of Boughton, a wonderful old man magnificently characterized through his way of talking, warmly benevolent with unexpected edges of granite. At the start of the book, his youngest daughter Glory, now 38, returns home to care for her father; she appears to be in retreat from problems of her own, but their nature only gradually becomes clear. A little later, Jack Boughton, the black sheep of the family, arrives after an absence of twenty years. Jack appears in GILEAD also; some of the information from the earlier book is revealed immediately, but we learn much more about his tormented life as the book goes on. One essential revelation from GILEAD is postponed to the very last pages of HOME, so that readers who come to this book first may find the ending even more moving. For Jack, with his mixture of outward charm and inner despair, becomes a character to care for. We follow his spiritual trajectory over the next few months first with hope, then with joy, then with sympathy. This is a sad book, but by no means a bleak one.

Are there really two novels to be found in Gilead in 1956? Not quite; more like one and three-quarters. But this second book, though perhaps overlong, is entirely absorbing in its own right, and surprisingly different from its predecessor. GILEAD was a vertical book, having to do with four generations of fathers and sons, and with man's relationship to God; HOME is a horizontal one, focusing on the relationship between brother and sister, and the accumulation of memories, custom, and duties that make a home a home, whether a solace or a burden. GILEAD was broad in scope, reaching back to the Civil War and denying the apparent isolation of its characters in place and time; HOME turns inward, presenting the outside world merely as something lurking on the periphery. I was going to say that while GILEAD is primarily a religious work, HOME is a secular one, but that is not quite true; HOME does not quite have the luminous spirituality of GILEAD, yet GILEAD also seems the more down-to-earth of the two books. This reduction in range made me question giving HOME its fifth star -- and yet why not, since it pales only by comparison with GILEAD, which was a six-, seven-, or ten-star book if there ever was one?

Marilynne Robinson continues to write shining prose that compels you to keep reading, common sense expressed with scriptural overtones, as in this passage where John Ames contemplates how his friend Reverend Boughton must feel in his retirement: "The Sunday-school children were marrying, and the married couples had settled into difficult, ordinary life, and the grave old men and women who had taught the Sunday-school children about bands of angels and flying chariots were themselves crossing over Jordan one by one." If this seems as beautiful to you as it does to me, you will enjoy this moving and deeply understanding novel.

56 of 63 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars As near perfect a companion... September 17, 2008

By Liturgy Geek

Format:Hardcover

...to Gilead as one could hope for. And hope, it seems to me - hope realized, hope deferred, hope in spite of reality - is at the core of this book. I saw this book at an airport bookstore and as soon as I saw that it returned to Gilead (didn't even finish reading the jacket), I purchased it. However, it took me some time to open it, because frankly I was afraid that it might not be as good as Gilead, that something from the perfection of that book might be ruined in the attempt to return there.

I needn't have worried, nor should you, if you read and loved Gilead. The perfect ambiguity of Gilead's ending is preserved, and we learn more about all the characters that were most real to me - Robert, Glory, and Jack. We meet characters only alluded to previously, and what a wonder they are! As others have noted, it is a slow, deliberate novel - though certainly wordier and less spare than Gilead. But it is a slow, deliberate story, and one to take your time with.

And hope - we always return to it. What hope and wonder are displayed in this little book, even in the midst of alcoholism, depression, small-town drama, racial conflicts, dementia. Don't be confused, however, but it's not romantic, sentimental and syrupy hope. It is deeply, profoundly, faithful hope - more like what John Ames describes at the end of Gilead: "...whatever hope becomes after it begins to weary a little, then weary a little more." A good ending can make a novel, and this one casts a wonderful vision.