In the epistolary novel Gilead,
an elderly, sickly preacher is writing a letter to the
seven-year-old son he won’t live to shepherd into adulthood. In
gracious, literate prose, Rev. John Ames imparts what he wants the boy
to know about their family history and about faith.
The pastor of a Calvinist church in small-town Gilead, Iowa, Rev. Ames
comes from a line of preachers, including his father and grandfather,
who were estranged over the grandfather’s militant abolitionism. Having
lost his wife and infant daughter decades before, Ames lived alone
until a vagabond woman half his age came into Gilead and after a while
said, “You should marry me.” The second wife remains a mystery through
much of Gilead; her story is
told in the later novel Lila.
Gilead is in many ways a novel
about fathers and sons. A subplot involving another father-son pair,
Ames’s friend the Rev. John Boughton, Gilead’s Presbyterian minister,
and his wayward son Jack presents a moral conundrum for Ames.
Ames’s thorough goodness might be beyond belief if Robinson hadn’t
handled it as a testimony to rock-solid faith. As the reverend
meditates about the love of spouses, friends, parents, children, and
God; about the possibility of change; about forgiveness and hope; about
the transcendence of the natural world, readers may decide to keep Gilead nearby to return to as
spiritual reading, not just as a novel.
Gilead is the first book in a
trilogy. It was followed by Home
(2008), which features the Boughtons, and Lila (2014).
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