Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson (Pulitzer Prize winner in 2005)

This novel takes the form of a letter by an elderly preacher to his young son, to be given to the son when he has grown up. There are several heart-wringing circumstances. In fact the entire novel consists of a chain of exhausting emotional tales. You’ll cry over them if you’re at all inclined to sob stories. And who isn’t, these days, when all of real life seems filled with lies and only fiction tells the truth?

The preacher is the son and grandson of preachers, so three father-son relationships are explored, plus the marriage of preacher and his young wife. Everything is spick and span. No real dirt in this novel, which is perhaps why it won a Pulitzer. I can’t think why else, unless it’s the period covered: the US civil war through to the 1950s, and the harmless – almost nostalgic – view it takes of religion. Robinson makes no connection between the Church and slavery except abolitionist. She doesn’t talk much about the Church’s support for the various American wars. And there aren’t any Tea Parties or Raptures evident. This is a cleverly wrought, poetic novel, a vision almost from beyond the grave, a personal testament, and Marilynne Robinson does an excellent job of avoiding potential menaces to her atmosphere.

I found the whole thing much too much: too sugar-coated, far too American in tone and content for my taste, too smug, too filled with unchallenged assumptions and concepts. It was as though the American ideal of each individual having a right to his own thoughts had been transformed, via each individual being right according to his own lights, to each individual being right. I can see this as an evolution in American ethos, but – glory me – I’d appreciate a scrap of help from the author placing it all in context.

So we’re left with the question whether this is a romance novel in disguise. Do we have stock characters pulled out for consumption, with just the right amount of uncertainty at the correct moments to keep the pot boiling? I’m afraid so. And the novel didn’t only win a Pulitzer; it apparently was an “international bestseller”.

Shows what I know.

Aaron Rynd