‘Jack Boughton – prodigal son – has been gone twenty years. He returns home seeking refuge and to make peace with the past. A bad boy from childhood, an alcoholic who cannot hold down a job, Jack is perpetually at odds with his surroundings and his traditionalist father, though he remains Boughton’s most beloved child. His sister Glory has also returned, fleeing her own mistakes, to care for their dying father.

A moving book about families, about love and death and faith, Home is unforgettable. It is a masterpiece.’ 

Gilead, the prequel to Home, introduced me to the work of Marilynne Robinson. The novel is written from the perspective of an ageing minister living in mid-twentieth century Iowa, as his failing health and worries for the future of his young son compel him to ruminate on his faith and his history. Gilead fits into the literary genre I refer to as the Stoner club, after John Williams’s novel of the same name: the novel is beautifully and lyrically written in the realist tradition; is quiet and unassuming in its themes and ambitions; and attests to the inviolable dignity of the individual life, no matter how ordinary, how plagued by sorrow, or how short. I love fantasy, historical fiction, memoirs, poetry, and big sprawling intergenerational epics, but the members of the Stoner club are my favourite kind of books, reaffirming my admittedly liberal humanist tendencies in the sustaining powers of literature. Members of my Stoner club include all novels by John Williams (naturally), Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, anything by John McGahern, Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick, East of Eden by John Steinbeck, A Whole Life by Robert Seethaller, In the Distance by Hernan Diaz, and The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and I am always looking for recommendations in this vein. This lengthy preamble is merely to say that Robinson’s qualifications for the Stoner club initially drew me to her work, and further exploration of her novels and essays has elevated her to the position of one of my favourite authors, whose subtle but immaculate style, deeply intelligent and compassionate religiosity, and incisive humanity make of her books beautifully haunting meditations on the meaning of life, the worthiness of moral codes, and the redemptive power of love and grace. 

In Home, Robinson reintroduces readers of Gilead to the Boughton family, specifically Glory and Jack, two of the children of the retired Presbyterian minister Robert Boughton, who have both returned to the family home. While Glory, the youngest of the Boughtons, takes refuge from the disappointment of a broken promise and a shattered domestic idyll, Jack returns to the family fold after a twenty-year absence stained by addiction, minor criminality, and alienation. The premise and structure of the novel draw on various religious allusions: the parable of the prodigal son obviously mirrors Jack’s return to his childhood home, but Glory’s assumption of domestic responsibilities and the care of her ailing father draw on the story of Martha and Mary, while repeated parallels are drawn between Jack and the resurrected Lazarus: 

‘Jack had walked in on a potent thought of himself, like Lazarus with the memory of the cerements about him no matter how often he might shave or comb his hair.’

This complex reference to Lazarus’s resurrection throws grist in the mill of the miraculous; though Jack’s homecoming is greeted as evidence of divine grace by his father, he cannot shake a sense of irrefutable otherness and unbelonging, haunted by the memories of past betrayals and misdeeds as well as the loneliness that defines his character. As Jack, nearing forty, negotiates his relationship with his history and his family, readers are presented with the muted tragedy of Glory’s attempts to carve out an identity separate from her father, her siblings, and her childhood home through her teaching career and her hopes of motherhood. Without detracting from the profound isolation that has marked Jack out from early childhood, Robinson shows that the drama of his self-imposed exile constitutes just one of the endlessly sad, sometimes unconscious ways in which families can wound and bind each other, casting the domestic space as both sanctuary and  prison, and the patriarch Boughton as both harbinger of grace and instrument of oppression. The novel is neither fast-paced nor plot-heavy, but Robinson holds readers wrapt as she shows Glory and Jack navigating the boundaries of their new adult relationship. The age difference between them and the length of Jack’s absence have made strangers of the siblings, and, as they confront their father’s accelerating decline, they regard each other watchfully and warily, loath to destroy the fragile bonds that develop between them, and fearful of irrevocably pushing the other away. The subtlety of this dance is framed in the context of the extraordinary intimacy and mutual understanding of the Boughton family, from which Jack feels eternally estranged. It gradually emerges that this familial closeness relies on each member keeping aspects of their lives and personalities secret, observing a delicacy that borders on miscommunication, evasiveness, and the burial of any thought or action that might call their experience and faith into question. Through the free indirect discourse of Glory’s consciousness, Robinson states at one point that indiscretion is a more serious infraction of the Boughton code than ‘most things prohibited by Scripture’, and the family’s modus operandi is captured in a deeply poignant passage:

‘Her father looked sombre. A failed lie meant his suspicions were correct, and she had probably never lied to him successfully. In fact, lying in that family almost always meant only that the liar would appreciate discretion. So the transparency of a falsehood was very much to the point. She had cordoned off her own embarrassments from inquiry by means of a few explanations that were false on their face and never tested or returned to for that reason. As a matter of courtesy they treated one another’s deceptions like truth, which was a different thing from deceiving or being deceived. In fact, it was a great part of the fabric of mutual understanding that made their family close.’

The failures of communication and expression necessitated by the arrangements of Boughton existence transform acts of domestic service and instances of physical proximity or assistance into moments of astonishing potency. As verbal confidences falter and retreat, the development of familial trust relies on implicit surrenders of autonomy, as shown by the extraordinary intimacy of Glory’s attempt to extract a splinter from her brother’s hand: 

‘“All right. Stay as still as you can.” She thought, If he really were a stranger, this would not seem so odd to me. She could hear his breathing. She could see the blue traces of blood under the white skin of his wrist. “Just a second – there.” She extracted the splinter easily enough. “Thank you,” he said.’

Such minor triumphs in the relationship between Jack and Glory are deeply felt by the reader, all the more so for the tenderness of Robinson’s beautifully rendered prose. Although Robinson, in line with other members of the Stoner club, affords her characters an inner, impregnable privacy, the sharpness of her psychological understanding cuts through the veil of subjectivity, offering readers piercing insights into individual habits and behaviours. The strange and haunting beauty of moments like the splinter extraction, instances of sanctified intimacy between the siblings, is cast in the heartbreaking overlap between hope and failure in Jack’s fragile worldview. Without impinging on Jack’s dignity, Robinson implicitly likens his character to an abused dog, totally uncomprehending of fundamental reasons for his suffering, and as liable to bite the hand that feeds him as he is to assume a permanent place in the Boughton home:

‘He never let himself be a burden to her if he could avoid it, or accepted help he did not immediately repay with help. When she laundered her father’s shirts for him, he in return mopped the kitchen floor and waxed it, too. He did such things with a thoroughness and flair he always quite plausibly ascribed to professional experience. She trued to assure him that it wasn’t necessary to maintain this careful reciprocity, but he only raised his eyebrows, as if to say he might know more about that than she did. She realised it was not only proud but also prudent in a man so disposed as he was, by habit and experience, to doubt his welcome. It calmed him a little to know he had been useful. And his self-sufficiency was also guardedness, as if his personal effects could be interpreted, or as if, few as they were, worn as they were, they were saturated with the particulars of his secretive life, and could mock or accuse him, or expose old injury, or old happiness, which seemed to be the same thing, more or less.’

And yet, for all the sympathy Robinson ekes from her readers towards Jack, the gravity of his past betrayals and abandonments is never glossed over, and the emotional drama of the novel hinges on Robinson’s concomitant understanding of grace as immanent, unpredictable, and all-important. The novel is unflinching in its enumeration of the harm and havoc, both petty and irreversible, that Jack caused in his youth; the great tragedy of his character lies in his perception of his own inexplicable wickedness, and his suspicion that his redemption would undermine the whole concept of divine justice. The theme of forgiveness, interwoven as it must be with interpretations of grace, is treated dialectically throughout the novel, with the Reverends Ames and Boughton coming to represent opposing arguments. Boughton, masking his own struggle to comprehend the unconditional nature of his love for Jack in the context of the suffering his son has caused, takes the position that no mortal is entitled to judge another, humble sinners as we all are, and teaches that the faithful should honour everyone, and place no limits on pardon or grace. Boughton’s belief is bound up with his reverence for mystery, and is summarised by his reassurance to Jack: 

‘Nobody deserves anything, good or bad. It’s all grace. If you accepted that, you might be able to relax a little.’

This position is attractive, even seductive, particularly when considered on an individual scale and when applied to our anti-hero, Jack. Ames, on the other hand, counters Boughton’s belief in the ‘perfect sufficiency of grace’ with an insistence on the ‘gravity of sin’, taking a more severe stance on the constraints of the forgivable, and adopting greater wariness towards Jack in the process. While readers might flinch at the minor ways in which Ames punishes Jack, it is hard to deny the undermining of individual agency and free will brought about by Boughton’s beliefs. This suspicion of a belief in universal, all-forgiving grace as complacent is sharpened by Robinson’s persistent return to the systemic injustice of race relations in America, which is in itself a stroke of brilliance. Throughout the novel, for reasons that are only hinted at until its conclusion, Jack rails against segregation and the brutality with which civil rights protests are met in the southern states. Robinson’s integration of America’s fatal flaw in the deeply personal, domestic core of her novel, is neither sententious, indelicate, more forced; there is no sense that the author is attempting to co-opt another’s narrative in the interest of emotional heft. Rather, her tone is rueful and quietly furious, conveying a conviction that the historical and ongoing mistreatment of the country’s Black population does indeed ‘call into question the seriousness of American Christianity.’ Though the subtleties of Robinson’s faith permeate the novel and form the basis of its ultimate expressions of hope, Home is no Little Women. There is enormous patriotic instinct in the challenges Robinson poses to American values, behaviours, and hypocrisies; although she affords narratives of the inevitable triumph of good over evil tender beauty in their childlike incarnations (as in the poignant awe Robby, Ames’s young son, feels after seeing a Western film), she underscores the anodyne, dangerous religiosity that feeds the fallacy at the core of American expansionism and mid-twentieth century policies of containment. Throughout the novel, there is constant probing of notions of justice or fairness on macro- and micro-levels, including moral absurdities like the preventable death of children before the invention of penicillin. This probing leads to interrogations of human self-importance and arrogance, as when Jack is dragged into moral despair by a self-aggrandising belief that the child may suffer for the sins of its father, or vice versa. In her intellectually astonishing treatment of the complexities of grace and forgiveness, Robinson elaborates an argument that Christianity should not always seek to justify or understand the distribution of earthly pain and deliverance, nor should it turn a blind eye to injustice with palliative notions of the ubiquity of grace, but should, when called upon by its own tenets, take on the mantle of Ames’s abolitionist grandfather and fight. 

As previously indicated, one of the most admirable elements of Robinson’s writing is  the elegance with which she alters the scope of her novel from the national or global to the individual or familial domain. The exploration of the domestic space, as the title suggests, is central to the novel’s logic and impact. The preparation of food and the tending of gardens are described in restorative, nostalgic terms; as he cultivates the family garden, Jack shows his esteem for the storied rites and rituals of his family, and invokes a shared and remembered joy, connecting with his father and sister in a way that words will not permit:

‘Jack had added to the garden, sunflowers and snapdragons and money plants, several hills of cantaloupe, a pumpkin patch, three rows of corn. He rescued the bleeding-heart bushes from a tangle of weeds and tended the gourds with the tact of a man who believed, as as all Boughtons did, that they throve on neglect. When her brothers and sisters were children they had made rattles of the gourds when they dried, and bottles and drinking cups, playing Indian. They had carved pumpkins and toasted the seeds. They had pretended the silver disks of money plants were dollars. They had pinched the jaws of snapdragons to make them talk, or pinched their lips closed to pop them. They had eaten the seeds of sunflowers when they were ripe and dry. They had opened the flowers of bleeding hearts to reveal the tiny lady in her bath. Corn on the cob they had all loved, though they hated to shuck it, and they had all loved melons. Jack tended these things with particular care. When he was restless he would sometimes walk out into the garden and stand there with his hands on his hips, as if it comforted him to see their modest flourishing.’ 

Just as Jack offers evidence of his enduring love through gardening, Glory’s acts of service, such as cutting her father’s hair, speak to a gentleness and softness at the heart of the family’s interactions, running in tandem with its odd constraints and taboos, its ‘starchy proprieties’ and silences. Robinson has an astonishingly tender capacity to find the miraculous in the mundane; although the Biblical story of Martha and Mary hovers in the background, and Glory is burdened with all manner of unspoken duties as the woman of the house, there is no gendered dismissal of domestic tasks, and moments of intimacy are produced by the shared and sacred reverence with which chores are sometimes undertaken. Indeed, while Robinson never seeks to erase the restrictions perpetuated by the spectre of the ideal housewife in 1950s America, female agency in the domestic space is laden with a peculiar potency; Glory and Lila, Ames’s wife, act as mediators, nurses, judges, and interpreters, paving paths to reconciliation where the men in their lives stumble and flinch. The implications of Robinson’s navigation of the domestic are not just moral, but aesthetic, as in this beautiful description of the smell of cooking serving as an emotional conductor, a maternal inheritance of subtle and strange power:

‘How to announce the return of comfort and well-being except by cooking something fragrant. That is what her mother always did. After every calamity of any significance she would fill the atmosphere with the smell of cinnamon rolls or brownies, or with chicken and dumplings, and it would mean, This house has a soul that loves us all, no matter what. It would mean peace if they had fought, and amnesty if they had been in trouble. It had meant, You can come down to dinner now, and no one will say a thing to bother you, unless you have forgotten to wash your hands. And her father would offer the grace, inevitable with minor variations, thanking the Lord for all the wonderful faces he saw around his table. She wished it mattered more that the three of them loved one another. Or mattered less, since guilt and disappointment seemed to batten on love. Her father and brother were both laid low by grief, as if it were a sickness, and she had nothing better to offer them than chicken and dumplings. But the thought that she could speak to them in their weary sleep with the memory of comfort lifted her spirits a little. There was a nice young hen in the refrigerator, and there were carrots. There were bay leaves in the cupboard. Baking powder. Lila would send Robby over with whatever she lacked, knowing better than to ask why Glory or Jack didn’t go to the store themselves. Good Lila. She might know some simple, commonplace treatment for hangover, some cool hand on the brow that would wake Jack from his sweaty sleep, as if penance were swept aside by absolution. If there were such a thing, Jack would know and would have asked for it, unless misery was the way he spoke to himself, unless he had meant to recruit his whole body to the work of misery. There would be a rightness in his grieving in every nerve. However slight her experience, she did know that. And she knew he would sleep for hours, and awake vague and sombre. So she bathed the hen and set the water with the carrots and an onion and the bay leaves. Some salt, of course. And she turned on the heart. Poor little animal. This life on earth is a strange business.’ 

Robinson’s talent is both grounding and otherworldly, weaving affective warmth and intellectual probity just as she navigates the realm of the domestic by the lodestones of the cosmic. The sanctity of the home, of the family, is asserted with grace and humanity, but the novel manages to avoid saccharine folksiness at all times, and casts an unflinching, curious, compassionate eye on the complexities of domestic relationships, and the unbridgeable divides that can grow out of mutual love and misunderstanding. Robinson’s characters are deeply intelligent, as shown by the elegance and wit of their dialogue, as well as the earnestness with which they articulate their thoughts and beliefs, standing as evidence of the respect their author feels towards them, and the ultimate unknowability of their innermost experiences. Home is both unspeakably sad and hopeful, propelled by a Christian logic that neither preaches nor evangelises, but simply asserts a place for wonder, for the sacred, amid the everyday joy, pain and confusion of ordinary life: 

‘How oddly holiness situated itself among the things of the world, how endlessly creation wrenched and strained under the burden of its own significance.’