Gilead Series by Marilynne Robinson

 

 

I'm uncertain about what led me to read Marilynne Robinson's 'Gilead', a book titled after the Midwestern town of Gilead, where the story takes place. One of the reasons why I persevered in reading this book was a curiosity about the historical Protestant Christian underpinnings of American society. While that was my initial draw, I also grew captivated by the vivid character portraits Robinson crafts across these four linked novels. There is nothing that could be considered a worthy plot line that runs through or across these novels other than Jack's doomed love affair with a colored woman, if at all it could be deemed as such. That effectively makes these novels a vivid sketch of characters through the passage of time along with their ruminations which are often theologically Christian in nature.

          Although the storyline of Marilynne Robinson's first novel 'Gilead' centers on Rev. John Ames and his family history, it also offers a glimpse into the lives of other characters who later star in their own novels. These would include Rev. Robert Boughton and his tangled and complicated son Jack and Lila an orphaned girl who has lived most of her life as a vagabond before eventually marrying the elderly Rev. Ames and settling into a life of uncertain domesticity.  These novels were written and published over a 16 year long period. I read through all the four novels, and my first advice to readers would be that it can often feel cumbersome reading them, especially the latter two novels 'Lila' and 'Jack'. A possible cause for this cumbersomeness could be attributed to a tendentious repetition that stems from Mrs. Robinson's desire to finetune the description of the inner world of her characters. But this tendentiousness is maybe to an extent balanced by the wonderfully poignant passages that are strewn across these novels as well as the brilliant rendering of some of the characters who inhabit these pages. And what better person     

        I would start