Where the Heart Is: Marilynne Robinson’s Home

Marilynne Robinson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gilead, returns to Gilead, Iowa in her latest novel, Home (2008). Though the events of Home run concurrent with Gilead, Home stands wonderfully in its own right. The narrative voice belongs to tenderhearted Glory Boughton, thirty-eight, who has recently returned to the family home in Gilead to care for her ailing father. As its title suggests, Home is deeply concerned with the emotional and spiritual complexity of homecomings; the central and most conflicted being that of Glory’s beloved brother Jack, the family reprobate and prodigal. The story follows Jack’s difficult journey toward reconciliation with his estranged family, particularly his aged, deteriorating father, the Rev. Robert Boughton.

Jack Boughton may well be one of the most richly complex characters to grace modern fiction. Robinson treats him carefully, as do her characters, and she never quite lets us in to see what exactly troubles him so, what causes him to run and rebel. He is continually in hiding-from his family and from the reader. He has never felt at home, and we don’t know why. He himself wonders if it is simply a matter of predestination. Robinson, however, is content to leave him tantalizingly open for interpretation.

We do know that Jack is intensely disturbed by the horrors faced by the black community in the South. The novel is set in the turbulent beginning of the Civil Rights movement, and Robinson soberly indicts the citizens of Gilead and its brand of Christianity for its passive stance on issues of race. The Christianity of Gilead, once “the shining star of radicalism” in the days of the Civil War, has settled into a comfortable, personal piety rather than a concerned activism. This failure is what ultimately prevents Jack from finding a home in Gilead, as he feels that he cannot safely bring his wife-an African American woman-and their small son to live with him there.

Home is also concerned with Glory’s reluctant return to Gilead, and her difficulty in resigning herself to a life quite different than the one she imagined:

She had dreamed of a real home for herself and the babies and the fiancé, a home very different from this good and blessed and fustian and oppressive tabernacle of Boughton probity and kind intent. She knew, she had known for years, that she would never open a door on that home, never cross that threshold, never scoop up a pretty child and set it on her hip and feel it lean into her breast and eye the world from her arms with the complacency of utter trust. Ah well.

As the passage demonstrates, Robinson excels in creating a meditative tone, full of dust and sunlight, which encourages the reader to read more slowly and more thoughtfully. The novel is wonderfully interior, the majority of the action occurring within the Boughton abode itself, and within Glory’s thoughts in particular.

Robinson also probes at the notion that hope and longing-particularly for a sense of belonging-signify a vacuity in the soul that exists to be filled. Absence, we may assume, implies Presence; lack indicates a state that should not be. She identifies and deeply sympathizes with man’s

odd capacity for destitution, as if by nature we ought to have so much more than nature gives us. As if we are shockingly unclothed when we lack the complacencies of ordinary life. 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 that of what is wanting and what alleviation would be, and how the soul could be put at ease, restored. At home.

The novel will not, alas, grant a triumphant culmination, but instead creates space for a future fulfillment and homecoming. This is possible, because as Reverend Ames’ wife declares to Jack, “A person can change. Everything can change.” Because we can change, salvation is possible, and possibly imminent. Hope, therefore, is justified.

Some have said that as far as Marilynne Robinson’s fiction goes, nothing much happens. This is certainly true. Her novels aren’t driven so much by plot as they are driven by people-their desires fulfilled and deferred. This is especially true of Home, as much of its plot is already known to the reader who has encountered Gilead. Her ruminative and luminous novel thus encourages one not to read for what happens, but how it happens, and why. It is well worth it.

*Photo provided by Flickr.