Home, Marilynne Robinson, USA, 2008
In destitution, even of feeling or purpose, a human being is more hauntingly human and vulnerable to kindnesses because there is the sense that things should be otherwise, and then the thought of what is wanting and what alleviation would be, and how the soul could be put at ease, restored. At home. But the soul finds its own home if it ever has a home at all. (Page 295 Virago edition)
This is an utterly beautiful, devastatingly sad, book about love, relationships and forgiveness. Although the pace of the book may seem slow without much physical action, the writing is magnetic, the action restricted to the inner, emotional level of the three main characters. As we follow the Reverend and two of his eight, now adult, children as they prepare and eat breakfast, lunch and dinner, as they move about the old house or through the overgrown garden, and as we listen to footsteps on stairs and to the inhalations and exhalations of the old house, we eavesdrop on the memories, regrets and self-accusations of these three people.
Set in the fictional town of Gilead in Iowa, the story focuses on a widower Reverend Robert Boughton, retired Presbyterian minister, who is rapidly nearing the end of his life, his wayward son, Jack, who returns home almost without warning after twenty years of absence and silence, and the youngest daughter, Glory, who is still unmarried and middle-aged. We are led to believe that the other children have all done well with their careers and their relationships.
Robert Boughton feels that he has failed Jack; Jack feels that he has failed his father and himself; Glory regrets the decisions she made and those she did not make, and she knows that she has failed herself. None of the three blame anyone but themselves for the direction their lives have taken, but they are all looking for forgiveness. Slowly, through the course of the book, they realise, each in his or her own way, that before they can accept the forgiveness of others they must be able to forgive themselves.
Jack recoils from his past and the thoughtless things he has done as a younger version of himself, while his father asks himself if he has been a good father and Glory, bitter at her lot in life, wonders if things had been different had she been more upfront with what had been happening in her life. That she was left on the shelf after a long engagement to a man who unbeknown to Glory was already married is not something she had been able to share with her family – not until she finds herself opening up to her brother.
This is a story about the deep love within a family, the lies that are told in order to protect, and the way we vacillate between feelings of love and disappointment. As a matter of courtesy they treated one another’s deceptions like truth, which was a different thing from deceiving or being deceived. In fact, it was a great part of the fabric of mutual understanding that made their family close.(Page 242 Virago edition)
It is a story about tendency to misjudge ourselves and our misguided belief that others will judge us in the same way. It is about tenderness and duty and the search for something beyond ourselves. It is about faith and the fear of not being able to believe. It is about the wrong decisions we make because we won’t let ourselves believe that we are better than we let ourselves believe (or that other people are more understanding than we will acknowledge). But most of all it is about love.