Calvinist Pleasures

Review of Home by Marilynne Robinson (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008). Trouw, March 21, 2009.

The “home” Marilynne Robinson writes about in her new novel looks at first like an American cliché of contentment: a little Midwestern farm town in the 1950s, and within it the large, comfortable house of the reverend Robert Boughton. In this house in Gilead, Iowa, he and his late wife raised their eight children, Boughton’s pride and joy. Yet when we’re told, on the very first page, that “the house embodied for him the general blessedness of his life, which was manifest, really indisputable,” we know Robinson plans to dispute the reverend’s blessings.
      Boughton’s children have found homes for themselves elsewhere. They meet at their father’s house for holidays, immersing themselves in nostalgia at the sight of the same books, the same furniture in the same places. But when Glory, at 38 the youngest Boughton child, returns alone, permanently, to care for her dying father, her heart sinks as she crosses the threshold. “The past was a very fine thing, in its place,” Glory thinks. “To have it overrun its bounds and become present and possibly future too—they all knew this was a thing to be regretted.”
      The other child who comes back in the same summer of 1956 is the prodigal son, the one blight on the Boughtons’ happiness. As a child, Jack Boughton kept to himself. As a teenager, he drank and stole. As a young man, he fathered and deserted an illegitimate child who later died. This finally broke his father’s heart, and Glory’s. He hasn’t been home since; it’s been 20 years.
      “Home” is the second novel Robinson has written about these characters. The first, “Gilead,” describes the same events, but from a different point of view, that of Boughton’s friend and colleague John Ames. Though they are very different books, they have in common Robinson’s stunningly beautiful writing and wise moral questioning. A practicing Christian and admirer of John Calvin, Robinson takes a calvinist’s pleasure in debating right and wrong. So while Ames appears to be a peaceful country pastor, at every turn Robinson asks us to question his choices—especially on the subject of racism. In “Gilead” we learn that Jack now has a black wife, that they have a son, and that he has come home looking for a place where they can live together safely. We already know that Ames will disappoint him.
      In “Home,” Boughton, too, falls short. Along with her explorations of race and religion, Robinson now turns her eye on that Christian institution, the family. “Home” asks what the members of a family owe each other, and whether or not they can give each other what they need. Boughton loves wayward, troublemaking Jack the best of all his children, and is always ready to forgive him. But he can’t understand him, and what Jack needs most, acceptance, he is too old and stubborn to concede.
      Like “Gilead,” “Home” is a slow-moving, contemplative book whose power is in Robinson’s ability to imply longing and promise beneath each word. Everything in and around the house, from the living room chairs to the iris beds in the garden, seems to carry an extra weight; every conversation feels like the tip of an emotional iceberg. In fact, Robinson keeps her characters under such tight control that it’s a relief when the explosion finally comes.
      On the family’s new television set, Jack has been following the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, led by Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks. When he sees, on the news, images of the police turning fire hoses and dogs on the peaceful protesters, he swears: “Jesus Christ!”
     His father, who doesn't know about Jack’s wife, reprimands Jack for his language, then takes the side of the police. “The Apostle Paul says we should do everything ‘decently and in order.’ You can’t have people running around the streets like that,” he says. Besides, “there’s no reason to let trouble like that upset you. In six months nobody will remember one thing about it.”
      Boughton’s complacency about racism—his moral cowardice, even—is one of his faults. Another is his inability to let Jack go. He can’t stop demanding a Boughton family harmony that Jack will never be able to deliver. “It is in family,” he says, “that we most often feel the grace of God, His faithfulness.” And yet this family is much less joyful and secure than its patriarch believes, because it leaves Jack, and lonely Glory too, out in the cold. Robinson seems to echo a question from “The Brothers Karamazov”: Suppose a happy and peaceful society (or, in this case, family) could be established whose only price was the torment of just one child? Would you be willing to live there?
     Robinson “cheats,” if that’s the word, by setting “Home” in the 1950s, when fathering a child out of wedlock was still a sin and alcoholism a vice rather than a disease. This lets her talk about her characters in moral and Biblical instead of psychological terms. Though Robinson’s descriptions of the wary, aloof, but basically decent Jack are elegant and convincing, he seems at times more like a theological problem than a three-dimensional person. You have to take on faith that Jack can be understood through the stories of Jacob and Esau and the Prodigal Son, and by words such as “faith,” “grace,” and “mystery.”
     If you can do this, if you can trust in Robinson’s eye and her prose, you’ll be rewarded with fiction about as beautiful and intelligent as it gets.