Gilead

Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, published in 2004, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award-and then prompted a small but fierce debate about whether literary prizes had finally got something exactly right. Written as a letter from an elderly Congregationalist minister in Iowa to the young son he will not live to see grow up, it is a novel about theology and fatherhood and the ordinary texture of a faithful life, and it is one of the most quietly extraordinary American novels of the century.

The narrator, John Ames, is seventy-six, dying of a heart condition, and writing in 1956. He is addressing a son he had late in life, after decades of widowhood, born of his second marriage to a woman half his age. The letter is his attempt to give the boy a father-to leave him the substance of a life rather than just its physical trace. What Ames writes about is memory, theology, the landscape of his small Iowa town, his relationship with his oldest friend, and his complicated feelings about the friend’s son who has returned to Gilead with an uncertain history.

The prose is the novel’s primary achievement: plain without being bare, reflective without being ponderous, alive to the precise texture of light and memory and the difficulty of articulating what one actually believes. Robinson writes in the tradition of American Protestant theology-Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, Karl Barth are presences in the book-but she has transformed that tradition into fiction of the most intimate kind.

Gilead is a novel about how to spend a life and what it means to have spent it well. It offers no easy answers, but it asks the questions with such seriousness and beauty that even readers with no religious commitments find themselves moved.