January 2009
The Book Club meets once a month (usually the second Tuesday of the month) in Castlebar Library at 8.00pm. Check events page for next meeting. (Previous Book Club selections)
Book for January meeting, 2009
Home by
Marilynne Robinson
After a 24-year silence, Marilynne Robinson returned to fiction with her second novel, Gilead. By any standards, that novel - an international bestseller and Pulitzer-winner in 2005 - was a surprising success.
Home is also set in Gilead; once again John Ames appears, but on the periphery. This time the central character is Jack Boughton, who featured briefly in the previous novel, the prodigal son of Ames's friend, the Reverend Boughton, a retired Presbyterian minister.
After 20 years away, Jack returns home, a destitute 43-year-old alcoholic and atheist, who has been in and out of jail for unspecified crimes. His elderly father is ailing and being cared for by his sister, Glory, the baby of the family. A former schoolteacher, recovering from a broken relationship, she is also seeking solace in the balm of Gilead. Temporarily, she hopes.
It is 1961, although the outside world makes very little impression in Gilead or on the sepulchral home of the title. Jack's return, nonetheless, excites great agitation in the household. His father, who blames himself for his son's waywardness and estrangement from loved ones - both his birth family and the teenage wife and daughter Jack abandoned 20 years before - is desperate to work out the why of his own and Jack's failure.
Glory, for her part, is angry not for Jack's years of absence but for the fact that he was always, in some way, lost.
Robinson's prose is beautiful and lusciously startling. That restored car gleams "like a ripe plum", old man Boughton's thinning fine hair is "a soft white cloud-like harmless aspiration, like a mist given off by the endless work of dreaming", washed cucumbers smell "like evening, like chill".
There is no grand resolution. Jack, who is the only one of the three who accepts his lostness as his particular fate, realises that all he can offer his father is a reassurance that he has not lost his faith. But, he remarks, even after a life of deception and betrayal, honesty is the one scruple he has left.
Robinson insists on the impossibility of love yet celebrates its manifestation on every page in the small, exquisite gestures of grace her flawed characters manage, in their failure, to bestow on one another.
Irish Times
'Her fiction attends with rapt attention to the "dear ordinary" breathing fresh air into the long-standing debates of American Protestantism'
Daily Telegraph
'A quietly moving novel of faith and forgiveness.'
Daily Mail
'So finely wrought as to make the work of her more productive contemporaries seem tawdry by comparison... The cadences of her prose have a resonant authority more like that of a great music rather than language. The effect is utterly haunting. The bad news is that is makes all other writing seem jejune for ages afterwards'
Sunday Telegraph
'A luminous, profound and moving piece of writing. There is no contemporary American novelist whose work I would rather read'
Independent
'This is certainly a novel about faith and love. However, it is also a meditation on doubt and fear... There is both a subtlety and a simplicity about her most powerful themes. She asserts the elusiveness of perfection, the foolishness of sever self-judgement and the unavoidable necessity of having to suffer in order to love... The beauty of HOME is that it does not offer the counterfeit currency of certainty but proffers the under-valued coin of hope. That is its glory, too'
Herald
'Compelling'
Observer
'One of the saddest books I have ever loved'
Guardian
There is almost no first-rate American fiction about what happens in a household where religion is the family business, but if you ever wondered what it's like to be a preacher's kid, you can't do better than "Home." Robinson's greatest achievement is that she manages to introduce the notions of belief and religious mystery without ever seeming vague. She never shies from uncomfortable truths. When Jack asks Glory why she hates Gilead and wants to leave, she says, "Because it reminds me of when I was happy." Fixing dinner, she "wished that it mattered more that [she and her father and brother] loved one another. Or mattered less, since guilt and disappointment seemed to batten on love. Her father and brother were both laid low by grief, as if it were a sickness, and she had nothing better to offer them than chicken and dumplings." This is a novel that builds its truth out of quotidian detail—the way Jack thumbs the felt on his hat brim, the way Glory
thinks in Bible verses: watching Jack leave at the end of the book, she thinks, "A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and as one from whom men hide their face. Ah, Jack." This is book full of sadness, but the greatest sadness on the reader's part is that it has to end.
Newsweek
Home offers such intricate characterizations, so many passages of surpassing wisdom and beauty, one yearns to quote page after page. It rejoices in the humblest actions - giving a haircut, weeding, making meals, coffee - the holiness of the daily.
San Francisco Chronicle
“Any novel from Marilynne Robinson arrives with a sense of the miraculous. More than two decades passed between the publication of her quietly earth-shattering debut, Housekeeping, a book that remains a modern classic, and its triumphant, expansive follow-up, Gilead, a Pulitzer Prize-winner in 2005. We can be grateful to not have to wait so long for Home ... Marilynne Robinson lives up to her dazzling reputation.”
Vogue
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