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296 of 309 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Heart-wrenching, haunting, beautiful..., September 6, 2008
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.
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100 of 109 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Prodigal at Home, September 25, 2008
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.
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45 of 55 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
As near perfect a companion..., September 17, 2008
...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.
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