Review by New York Times Review
regionalism has always played an important part in American literature, with, say, William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County the iconic Southern example. Those who have read Marilynne Robinson's radiant Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "Gilead," will remember that imaginary town in southernmost Iowa, near the conjunction of Missouri, Kansas and Nebraska - Plains country, partially Southern in spirit and looking west, thereby broadly embodying the essential rural Midwestern America at a seminal period, from the Depression to around 1950. Although American literature isn't usually known for its religious and philosophical novels, we might think of certain essential works, particularly of Melville and Hawthorne, that concern grace and redemption. Robinson's new novel, "Lila," combines these regional and spiritual strains of American writing. Two families are of special interest in the town of Gilead, the Boughtons and the Ameses, each having several generations of Protestant preachers. The narrator of "Gilead," the minister John Ames, both remembers and looks forward across a highly symbolic, almost biblical American landscape, timeless in its simplicity, mired in poverty and sustained by religion. Addressing his son, Ames recounts episodes of family history and confides his philosophical and religious concerns. The next volume, the much-admired "Home," picks up the histories of the two families from the point of view of the Boughtons. The two ministers, Boughton and Ames, careful readers of Feuerbach and Calvin, are thoughtful theologians in the days before television preachers tarnished the good name of the cloth. They are close friends, and though they have some doctrinal disagreements, they have much else to discuss. In "Home," Robinson describes the "decorous turmoil" of the soul of Robert Boughton, the Presbyterian, but neither man preaches, nor expects, hellfire. God is too good. "Thinking about hell doesn't help me live the way I should," Reverend Ames explains. "And thinking that other people might go to hell just feels evil to me, like a very grave sin." With "Lila," the third novel about these families and this town, we understand more clearly the metaphorical nature of the landscape, the era and the history. Lila is a migrant drifter child, then a migrant drifter woman, who eventually becomes the much younger wife of the elderly, widowed John Ames - and the mother of the boy being addressed in the first novel. Lila's personal tale mirrors conventional Dust Bowl stories during the lawless, desperate period of the Depression. When she is a gravely ill child of about 3, she is stolen away from people who might have let her die. Her kidnapper and surrogate mother is a rough woman called Doll, from whom Lila invents a surname for herself: Dahl. Lila and Doll are on the run most of the time, knowing no permanent situation, creature comforts or material possessions. More than once, Doll uses her knife to defend them. When Lila finally winds up in Gilead she has only one prized possession, the knife that belonged to Doll. THE CHILD'S UTTER DEPENDENCE on this woman is shaded by a frightened, tentative wariness that will characterize Lila's bruised emotional life as an adult. The story Robinson tells here concerns the affection Lila feels first for Doll, then for the elderly minister, and his for her, as well as her education and the beginnings of a healed psyche. Told with measured and absorbing elegance, this account of the growing love and trust between Lila and Reverend Ames is touching and convincing. The stages of Lila's strengthening sense of security are carefully delineated, physical relations and her pregnancy handled with careful tact. Central to all the novel's characters are matters of high literary seriousness - the basic considerations of the human condition; the moral problems of existence; the ache of being abandoned; the struggles of the aging; the role of the Bible and God in daily life. It's courageous of Robinson to write about faith at a time when associations with religion are so often negative and violent. And goodness, a property Midwesterners like to think of as a regional birthright, is even harder than piety to convey without succumbing to the temptation to charge it with sanctimony or hypocrisy. That is not the effect of this lovely narrative. Goodness resides in most of the people we meet here, even the madam, known simply as "Mrs.," who runs a whorehouse in St. Louis where Lila briefly lives. Mrs. lets the rather plain Lila off easy, charging her mostly with chores like cleaning and stoking the furnace. It may seem that Lila's chaste escape strains our credulity - when, for some reason, we believe in the sinister desperados met along the course of her odyssey. But we certainly don't wish her fate to have been otherwise. Next to the strange, dreamlike autonomy of characters like Doll, who drift along stealing babies and riding freight cars, the whorehouse scenes in St. Louis seem a little self-consciously cinematic, in spite of the durability of the metaphor - and not only because sin is so naturally allowed for in Robinson's generous understanding of human nature as to make them seem superfluous. The almost jolly atmosphere of the place, with its hearts of gold, threatens to violate the novel's grave tone of original innocence and tentative salvation. As in "Gilead" and "Home," Robinson steps away from the conventions of the realistic novel to deal with metaphysical abstractions, signaling by the formality of her language her adoption of another convention, by which characters inhabiting an almost Norman Rockwell-ish world (it is, after all, the same period) live and think on a spiritual plane without sacrificing the notion that they are, at the same time, weeding the garden or doing the mending. Characters might say things like "I believe also that the rewards of obedience are great, because at the root of real honor is always the sense of the sacredness of the person who is its object," a level of diction that isn't exactly natural speech but one that we understand and respond to with almost reflex admiration, as with Flannery O'Connor or, of course, King James. Throughout these novels, Robinson has a wonderful feel for Midwestern life, for what people would be wearing, eating, reading. (In "Home," for example, she notes that when MacKinlay Kantor, who grew up in Webster City, Iowa, had written the grim Civil War prison novel "Andersonville," "it had broken the heart of greater Des Moines.") Lila's virtue, intelligence and fine instincts prevail over her harsh experiences, but she retains her mistrust of certain things: "I don't understand theology," she says. "I don't think I like it." One wonders if that is Robinson's coda to three novels that involve quite a lot of theology. Very few allusions link life in Gilead to particular historical events, though a character once mentions that he might vote for Eisenhower. Nor is this novel about the specifics of Iowa, despite descriptions of its fields and the mention of a movie theater playing "To Have and Have Not." (If you were to look for a contemporary cinematic equivalent, you might think of the timeless tone and setting of the Coen brothers' "O Brother, Where Art Thou?") In the end, "Lila" is not so much a novel as a meditation on morality and psychology, compelling in its frankness about its truly shocking subject: the damage to the human personality done by poverty, neglect and abandonment. DIANE JOHNSON'S most recent book is a memoir, "Flyover Lives." 'Thinking that other people might go to hell just feels evil to me, like a very grave sin.'
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 28, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* We catch glimpses of the Reverend John Ames' much younger second wife, Lila, in Robinson's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Gilead (2004), the first in a deeply reflective saga set in a small Iowa town, the second volume of which is Home (2008). We now learn Lila's astonishing story, which begins with a thunderbolt opening scene, in which an abused little girl is swept up by a strange young woman called Doll. The two roam the countryside as itinerant workers, settling down just long enough for Lila to learn to read and write. As life grows even more harrowing during the Great Depression, and Doll's dangerous secrets catch up to her, capable and strong Lila fends for herself, ultimately arriving in Gilead. The wanderer and the minister embark on a wondrously unlikely and fitful courtship as Lila asks confounding questions about existence, belief, trust, and justice. Bringing the land to ravishing life, season by season, Robinson sets the tentative lovers' profoundly involving emotional and metaphysical struggles within both the singing web of nature and the indelible stories of the Bible. Robinson has created a tour de force, an unforgettably dramatic odyssey, a passionate and learned moral and spiritual inquiry, a paean to the earth, and a witty and transcendent love story all within a refulgent and resounding novel so beautifully precise and cadenced it wholly transfixes and transforms us. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Robinson's readers will be primed for the well-promoted third title in her cherished Iowa saga as the author tours the country.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This third of three novels set in the fictional plains town of Gilead, Iowa, is a masterpiece of prose in the service of the moral seriousness that distinguishes Robinson's work. This time the narrative focuses on Lila, the young bride of elderly Reverend Ames, first met in Gilead. Rescued as a toddler from abusive caretakers by a rough but kind drifter named Doll, raised with love but enduring the hard existence of a field worker, and later, in a St. Louis whorehouse, Lila is a superb creation. Largely uneducated, almost feral, Lila has a thirst for stability and knowledge. As she yearns to forget the terrible memories and shame of her past, Lila is hesitant to reveal them to her loving new husband. The courtship of the couple-John Ames: tentative, tender, shy, and awkward; Lila: naive, suspicious, wary, full of dread-will endure as a classic set piece of character revelation, during which two achingly lonely people discover the comfort of marital love. Threaded through the narrative are John Ames's troubled reflections that the doctrines of his Calvinist theology, including the belief that those who are not saved are destined for hell, are too harsh. Though she reads the Bible to gain knowledge, Lila resists its message, because it teaches that her beloved Doll will never gain the peace of heaven. Her questions stir up doubt in Ames's already conflicted mind, and Robinson carefully crafts this provocative and deeply meaningful spiritual search for the meaning of existence. What brings the couple together is a joyous appreciation of the beauty of the natural world and the possibility of grace. The novel ends with the birth of their son, to whom Ames will leave his diary in Gilead. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Starred Review. This gentle novel revisits characters in the town of Gilead, IA, the setting of Robinson's earlier novels Home and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead. Whereas Gilead focused on elderly minister John Ames's writing a letter to his seven-year-old son, this new work steps back nearly a decade to explain how John came to meet and marry second wife Lila, with the focus on her past rather than his. A homeless orphan, Lila led an itinerant life under the care of a woman named Doll. It was a life full of hardship, but Doll's love sustained the child. When Lila meets John, their courtship and marriage develop through discussions about the Bible and God, as Lila struggles to reconcile her own suffering with the love and kindness of her husband and his faith. It also proves difficult for her to settle down and to fit in among people whose lives are so different from the one she has lived. As with Gilead, this book is full of ruminations about faith, and it flows in a single gush without chapters. VERDICT While some readers may yearn for more action and structure, this is a lovely and touching story that grapples with the universal question of how God can allow his children to suffer. Recommended for fans of Robinson as well as those who enjoyed Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge, another exploration of pain and loneliness set against the backdrop of a small town. [See Prepub Alert, 4/7/14.] Evelyn Beck, Piedmont Technical Coll., Greenwood, SC (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
More balm in Gilead as Robinson (When I Was a Child I Read Books, 2012, etc.) returns to familiar ground to continue the saga of John Ames and his neighbors. Ames, Robinson's readers will know, is a minister in the hamlet of Gilead, a quiet place in a quiet corner of a quiet Midwestern state. Deceptively quiet, we should say, for Robinson, ever the Calvinist (albeit a gentle and compassionate one), is a master at plumbing the roiling depths below calm surfaces. In this installment, she turns to the title character, Ames' wife, who has figured mostly just in passing in Gilead (2004) and Home (2008). How, after all, did this young outsider wind up in a place so far away from the orbits of most people? What secrets does she bear? It turns out that Lila has quite a story to tell, one of abandonment, want, struggle and redemptionclassic Robinson territory, in other words. Robinson provides Lila with enough back story to fuel several other books, her prose richly suggestive and poetic as she evokes a bygone time before "everyonestarted getting poorer and the wind turned dirty" that merges into a more recent past that seems no less bleak, when Lila, having subsisted on cattails and pine sap, wanders into Gilead just to look at the houses and gardens: "The loneliness was bad, but it was better than anything else she could think of." She never leaves, of course, becoming part of the landscapeand, as readers will learn, essential to the gradually unfolding story of Gilead. And in Robinson's hands, that small town, with its heat and cicadas, its tree toads and morning dew, becomes as real as Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, just as charged with meaning if a touch less ominous, Lila's talismanic knife notwithstanding. Fans of Robinson will wish the book were longerand will surely look forward to the next. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
