Reviews for Gilead

The average rating for Gilead based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2007-05-09 00:00:00 Siobhan Duny It often feels as if the contemporary literary scene has internalized Anna Karenina's dictum on the nature of happiness'that it is not idiosyncratic, with the implication that it is not worth the kind of careful attention that literature applies to its subjects. We need look no further than our own lives to recognize the problem we'll encounter if we preoccupy ourselves with the Tolstoyan "unhappy family" at the expense of the happy ones. Asked about our defining or most enlightening moments, most of us are as likely to recount happy memories as we are moments of despair. Yet too often, contemporary literature ignores this. Authors able to give the lie to Tolstoy by rendering joy as a complex substance are few and far between: think Ron Carlson, Laurie Colwin, Ellen Gilchrist, Richard Russo. In this context, Marilynne Robinson's Gilead comes not just as a breath of fresh air, but as a ray of light, quietly penetrating to the heart of mysteries regarding joy and love, life and death. Because it's written as a series of missives from the aged narrator to his young son, meant not to be read until long after the narrator's death, Gilead is largely plotless'a conflict of sorts between the narrator and a friend's child does eventually develop, but it is a quiet conflict, and one that doesn't become clear until nearly halfway through the novel. The narrative is never as important as the meditations that surround it. This is a novel that celebrates life, that variegated communion between inner and outer worlds, between ego and experience. But Robinson is also concerned with death, not only as the inevitable end of that communion but also as its thematic counterpoint. If Robinson's territory here is the spiritual life of one man in particular, her thematic concern is how we in general can face the ends of our lives without despair or resort to existential reframings of the problem'how we can face the prospect of death, in fact, with quiet gratitude and even joy. Robinson's portrayal of religion is especially deft; instead of opiate or panacea, her narrator's Christianity serves as a lens, providing a stasis and a vocabulary through which the novel can wrestle with its concerns. Ultimately, the quiet conclusions that Gilead seems to favor'that the experience of existence is one that we should treasure as a gift, that we too often lose sight of the immense beauty of the world amidst our quotidian bustle, that love and charity have the power to remake lives'are neither religious nor secular. Rather, they are humanist; they all concern a belief in the fundamental dignity of human lives. Is it melodramatic to say that these are the kind of quiet encouragements that we could usefully carry in our minds into the shadows of our own personal Gethsemanes? Regardless, Gilead offers us, in its portrait of a long life reflected upon with some degree of contentment, a reminder of just how deep, enthralling, and abidingly strange happiness can be. Perhaps the problem is not that happiness is not idiosyncratic enough to be worth investigating. The problem may be instead that happiness is simply too big for most writers to write convincingly about, that perhaps joy, like God, is too capacious to fully describe. Yet here is the rare novel that suggests insights into the natures of both.

Review # 2 was written on 2007-10-04 00:00:00 Philip Held This book is amazing. I can't believe those frikkin twits didn't give Marilynne Robinson the Pulitzer for this..... oh wait, they did. Well, I can't believe they didn't give her two! Seriously, you are probably thinking, "I've heard this book takes the form of an elderly, angina-stricken preacher in Iowa's long, Lord-laden letter to his young son about how beautiful the world is. I'm sure it's all very nice for some people, but I am way too big of a jerk to enjoy something like that." Well, let me tell you something, friend: I am a pretty big jerk myself, and I loved it. This is one of the better books I have read. If this novel doesn't make you weep at some point, there is probably something seriously wrong with you. I'll admit that, like *Valley of the Dolls*, this book is probably not for everyone. But I really do recommend it to people who (like me) are not religious, and find others' faith difficult to understand. If you're able to respond empathically to characters in extremely well-written literature, this might be the best chance you get at entering this kind of experience. That was the way I felt about it, anyway. You only need to suspend some judgment you hold about religion, and take the protagonist's faith the way you would another belief or experience a fictional character might have that's diffferent from your own. I don't want to get carried away characterizing what the result of that was like for me, but I do recommend giving this book a try.