Home -- Marilynne Robinson
I bought Marilynne Robinson’s Home before everything happened, and the book’s plot didn’t seem foreboding or familiar. And then I decided to, and did, quit my job, and to move back home, and then suddenly this plot about failed adult children (one of whom was an English teacher!) returning to live with their father in a small Midwestern town seemed very different. I guess the point I’m trying to make is something like this: I rarely identify with fictional characters, I don’t know if I’ve ever felt really felt threatened by a novel before, and then all of a sudden I felt both of those things and I wasn’t sure if reading the novel was such a good idea after all. But I kept reading it anyway - or rather, I put off reading it for a long time and then picked up reading it again sometime while driving through Colorado and Kansas, and it turned out feeling humbled was okay, a thing to feel and then get over and then get to really love the book.
All of the reviews I’ve read of the book so far are glowing and vague; they call it sensitive and complicated and heartbreaking; they are all accurate, I guess, but seem to give you no real sense of the novel. I suppose this is partially because when reviewers love a book they sometimes - from what I can tell, anyway - veer off into dangerously sappy territory; and also because the book is 300 pages of three characters trapped in a house together mostly without any Major Events, interacting or not interacting, remembering or trying to forget, sometimes talking or playing checkers and sometimes angry and avoiding each other, very often silent out of contentment or fear or a failure of language. In some way Robinson seems a really unfashionable writer, partially because of her faith and subjects, but also because her last two novels are an odd mix of traditional novel writing but also slow moving and plotless (but not plotless in a “quirky,” “edgy,” “post-modern” sort of way). The pace sometimes made me feel impatient and sometimes made me feel grateful (I suppose if I was feeling sappy myself, I might be tempted to say something about “savoring” these characters or Robinson’s language.) It is beautifully written, of course, and though I liked Housekeeping an awful lot, the writing in House seemed more quiet and content, less about being Poetic or Showing Off.
And oh, watching these characters interact was believable, agonizing and satisfying - in some way I wished that Glory didn’t have to be quite so pathetic and Jack didn’t have to be quite so doomed, but the more I read the more impossible it seemed to imagine them any other way. It seems for the full effect, the thing to do would be to read Gilead and Home closer together to appreciate where and how they overlap, and I don’t know when I will ever reread these books any time in the near future, but it seems like a nice thing to have them here waiting when I’m ready.
All of the reviews I’ve read of the book so far are glowing and vague; they call it sensitive and complicated and heartbreaking; they are all accurate, I guess, but seem to give you no real sense of the novel. I suppose this is partially because when reviewers love a book they sometimes - from what I can tell, anyway - veer off into dangerously sappy territory; and also because the book is 300 pages of three characters trapped in a house together mostly without any Major Events, interacting or not interacting, remembering or trying to forget, sometimes talking or playing checkers and sometimes angry and avoiding each other, very often silent out of contentment or fear or a failure of language. In some way Robinson seems a really unfashionable writer, partially because of her faith and subjects, but also because her last two novels are an odd mix of traditional novel writing but also slow moving and plotless (but not plotless in a “quirky,” “edgy,” “post-modern” sort of way). The pace sometimes made me feel impatient and sometimes made me feel grateful (I suppose if I was feeling sappy myself, I might be tempted to say something about “savoring” these characters or Robinson’s language.) It is beautifully written, of course, and though I liked Housekeeping an awful lot, the writing in House seemed more quiet and content, less about being Poetic or Showing Off.
And oh, watching these characters interact was believable, agonizing and satisfying - in some way I wished that Glory didn’t have to be quite so pathetic and Jack didn’t have to be quite so doomed, but the more I read the more impossible it seemed to imagine them any other way. It seems for the full effect, the thing to do would be to read Gilead and Home closer together to appreciate where and how they overlap, and I don’t know when I will ever reread these books any time in the near future, but it seems like a nice thing to have them here waiting when I’m ready.