Lila
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Narrated by:
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Maggie Hoffman
About this listen
A new American classic from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gilead and Housekeeping. Marilynne Robinson, one of the greatest novelists of our time, returns to the town of Gilead in an unforgettable story of a girlhood lived on the fringes of society in fear, awe, and wonder.
Lila, homeless and alone after years of roaming the countryside, steps inside a small-town Iowa church - the only available shelter from the rain - and ignites a romance and a debate that will reshape her life. She becomes the wife of a minister, John Ames, and begins a new existence while trying to make sense of the life that preceded her newfound security.
Neglected as a toddler, Lila was rescued by Doll, a canny young drifter, and brought up by her in a hardscrabble childhood. Together they crafted a life on the run, living hand to mouth with nothing but their sisterly bond and a ragged blade to protect them. Despite bouts of petty violence and moments of desperation, their shared life was laced with moments of joy and love. When Lila arrives in Gilead, she struggles to reconcile the life of her makeshift family and their days of hardship with the gentle Christian worldview of her husband which paradoxically judges those she loves.
Revisiting the beloved characters and setting of Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead and Home, a National Book Award finalist, Lila is a moving expression of the mysteries of existence that is destined to become an American classic.
©2014 Marilynne Robinson (P)2014 Macmillan AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
2015, Folio Prize Nominee
2014, Christian Science Monitor Best Books of the Year
2014, National Book Awards - Finalist
2015, Man Booker Award - Nominee
2014, NPR Best Book of the Year
2014, Washington Post Best Books of the Year
2014, Seattle Times Best Books of the Year
2014, New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year
2014, National Book Critics Circle Award - Nominee
2014, Los Angeles Times Holiday Books Guide
“Lila is a book whose grandeur is found in its humility. That's what makes Gilead among the most memorable settings in American fiction . . . Gilead [is] a kind of mythic everyplace, a quintessential national setting where our country's complicated union with faith, in all its degrees of constancy and skepticism, is enacted.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
“Literary lioness Robinson--she's won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, a Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Award, among other laurels--continues the soaring run of novels with loosely connected story lines and deep religious currents that she launched a decade ago, almost a quarter century after her acclaimed fiction debut, Housekeeping . . . Lila's journey--its darker passages illuminated by Robinson's ability to write about love and the natural world with grit and graceful reverence--will mesmerize both longtime Robinson devotees and those coming to her work for the first time.” —Elle
“Ever since the publication of Robinson's thrilling first novel, Housekeeping, reviewers have been pointing out that, for an analyst of modern alienation, she is an unusual specimen: a devout Protestant, reared in Idaho. She now lives in Iowa City, where she teaches at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and where, for years, she has been accustomed to interrupting her career as a novelist to produce essays on such matters as the truth of John Calvin's writings. But Robinson's Low Church allegiance has hugely benefited her fiction . . . This is an unflinching book.” —Joan Acocella, The New Yorker
“Radiant . . . As in Gilead and Home, Robinson steps away from the conventions of the realistic novel to deal with metaphysical abstractions, signaling by the formality of her language her adoption of another convention, by which characters inhabiting an almost Norman Rockwell-ish world . . . live and think on a spiritual plane . . . [Lila is] a mediation on morality and psychology, compelling in its frankness about its truly shocking subject: the damage to the human personality done by poverty, neglect and abandonment.” —Diane Johnson, The New York Times Book Review
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- By: Lori Lansens
- Narrated by: Ruby Dee
- Length: 6 hrs and 27 mins
- Abridged
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When a 70-year-old woman finds a five-year-old girl abandoned on her doorstep, she is thrust into a sorrowful past that can only be conquered with the help of the girl who opened her memory - the very girl she is trying to save. This first novel, according to author Jacquelyn Mitchard, is one of "exquisite power, honesty, and conviction...quite nearly without flaws."
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filthy language and violent content
- By Anna on 12-16-11
By: Lori Lansens
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Fallen Angels
- By: Patricia Hickman
- Narrated by: John McDonough
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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During the Great Depression, Jeb Nubey is running from the law when he meets three abandoned children. With nowhere else to go the group passes a stormy night in a comforting church. When they are discovered, a case of mistaken identity ensues. It seems the congregation has been waiting for their new pastor, a widower with three kids. Looks like more trouble for Jeb. Yet the chance for a steady job and three squares a day is too good to turn down.
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Touching
- By Christina on 11-11-04
By: Patricia Hickman
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The Homeplace
- Singing River, Book 1
- By: Gilbert Morris
- Narrated by: Judith West
- Length: 12 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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As the year 1928 begins, 14-year-old Lanie Belle Freeman of Fairhope, Arkansas, has bright hopes for the future. Her father has launched a new business, and her mother is expecting her fifth baby. Lanie has dreams of going to college and being a writer. Then tragedy strikes.
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Slow to start. But hang in there. It’s worth it
- By paula wright on 02-24-19
By: Gilbert Morris
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Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen
- By: Susan Gregg Gilmore
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 6 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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In the latest novel from Susan Gregg Gilmore, sometimes you have to return to the place where you began to arrive at the place where you belong.
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Not what I expected but........
- By Coach "J" on 03-11-16
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Ellen Foster
- By: Kaye Gibbons
- Narrated by: Ruth Ann Phimister
- Length: 3 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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"When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy. I would figure out this or that way and run it down through my head until it got easy." So begins the tale of Ellen Foster, the brave and engaging heroine of Kaye Gibbons's first novel, which won the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Wise, funny, affectionate and true, Ellen Foster is, as Walker Percy called it, "The real thing. Which is to say, a lovely, sometimes heart/wrenching novel...."
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Great!!
- By Jo on 04-06-18
By: Kaye Gibbons
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Mudbound
- By: Hillary Jordan
- Narrated by: Ezra Knight, Kate Forbes, Joseph Collins, and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Hillary Jordan's mesmerizing debut novel won the Bellwether Prize for fiction. A powerful piece of Southern literature, Mudbound takes on prejudice in its myriad forms on a Mississippi Delta farm in 1946. City girl Laura McAllen attempts to raise her family despite questionable decisions made by her husband. Tensions continue to rise when her brother-in-law and the son of a family of sharecroppers both return from WWII as changed men bearing the scars of combat.
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May this South never rise again.
- By Betty on 03-25-12
By: Hillary Jordan
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Gloria
- By: Kerry Young
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 12 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Jamaica, 1938. Gloria Campbell is sixteen years old when a single violent act alters the course of her life forever. Taking along her younger sister, she flees their hometown to forge a new life in Kingston. But in a capital city awash with change, a black woman is still treated as a second-class citizen. From a room in a boarding house and a job at a supply store, Gloria finds her way to a house of ill repute on the edge of the city, intrigued by the glamorous, financially independent women within.
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Awesome story! And Robin Miles is a star!!
- By atlfolk on 06-23-18
By: Kerry Young
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A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
- By: Betty Smith
- Narrated by: Kate Burton
- Length: 14 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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A moving coming-of-age story set in the 1900s, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn follows the lives of 11-year-old Francie Nolan, her younger brother Neely, and their parents, Irish immigrants who have settled in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Johnny Nolan is as loving and fanciful as they come, but he is also often drunk and out of work, unable to find his place in the land of opportunity.
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Book: flawless. SKIP THE RECORDED INTRO!!
- By Wild Wise Woman on 09-04-11
By: Betty Smith
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A Cup of Dust: A Novel of the Dust Bowl
- Pearl Spence Novels, Book 1
- By: Susie Finkbeiner
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 9 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Ten-year-old Pearl Spence is a daydreamer, playing make-believe to escape life in Oklahoma's Dust Bowl in 1935. The Spences have their share of misfortune, but as the sheriff's family, they've got more than most in this dry, desolate place. They're who the town turns to when there's a crisis or a need. Pearl is proud of her loving, strong family, though she often wearies of tracking down her mentally impaired older sister or wrestling with her grandmother's unshakable belief in a God. Then a mysterious man bent on revenge tramps into her town of Red River.
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Intense
- By VickyJ on 02-07-21
By: Susie Finkbeiner
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Laddie
- A True Blue Story
- By: Gene Stratton-Porter
- Narrated by: Laurie Klein
- Length: 14 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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This is a captivating, good-humored look at family life in a small farming community in Indiana in the early 1900s.
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An American Classic
- By Clint on 07-04-10
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Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All
- By: Allan Gurganus
- Narrated by: Barbara McCulloh
- Length: 49 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Allan Gurganus's Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All became an instant classic upon its publication. Critics and fans alike fell in love with the voice of 99-year-old Confederate widow Lucy Marsden, one of the most entertaining and loquacious heroines in American literature. Lucy married at the turn of the 20th century, when she was 15 and her husband was 50. If Colonel William Marsden was a veteran of the "War for Southern Independence", Lucy became a "veteran of the veteran" with a unique perspective on Southern history and Southern manhood.
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Dated.
- By edie butler on 04-06-21
By: Allan Gurganus
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No Promises in the Wind
- By: Irene Hunt
- Narrated by: Charlie Thurston
- Length: 5 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
In 1932, Americans’ dreams were simple: a job, food to eat, a place to sleep, and shoes without holes. But for millions of people these simple needs were nothing more than dreams. When he was just 15 years old, Josh had to make his own way through a country of angry and frightened people. This is the story of his struggle to find a life for himself during those turbulent times.
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So wonderful!
- By Patterson Family CEO on 03-31-18
By: Irene Hunt
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Sophie and the Rising Sun
- By: Augusta Trobaugh
- Narrated by: Rue McClanahan
- Length: 6 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
In sleepy Salty Creek, Georgia, strangers are rare. When a quiet, unassuming stranger arrives - a Japanese man with a secret history of his own - he becomes the talk of the town and a new beginning for lonely Sophie, who lost her first love during World War I. Middle-aged Sophie had resigned herself to a passionless existence. That all begins to change as she finds herself drawn to the mysterious Mr. Oto.
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very good story
- By MissSusie66 on 08-20-12
By: Augusta Trobaugh
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Beyond the Pale
- By: Elana Dykewomon
- Narrated by: Elana Dykewomon
- Length: 15 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Beyond the Pale - winner of the Lambda Literary Award - tells the stories of two Jewish women living through times of darkness and inhumanity in the early 20th century, capturing their undaunted love and courage in luminous and moving prose. The richly textured novel details Gutke Gurvich's odyssey from her apprenticeship as a midwife in a Russian shtetl to her work in the suffrage movement in New York.
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great historical fiction with a lesbian twist
- By Kelly on 11-25-13
By: Elana Dykewomon
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Going to Meet the Man
- By: James Baldwin
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 7 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
"There's no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it." The men and women in these eight short fictions grasp this truth on an elemental level, and their stories, as told by James Baldwin, detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their heads above water.
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Punch in the gut
- By Rebecca on 05-08-17
By: James Baldwin
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When I Was a Child I Read Books
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Ria lived on Tara Road in Dublin with her dashing husband, Danny, and their two children. She fully believed she was happily married, right up until the day Danny told her he was leaving her to be with his young, pregnant girlfriend. By a chance phone call, Ria meets Marilyn, a woman from New England unable to come to terms with her only son's death and now separated from her husband. The two women exchange houses for the summer with extraordinary consequences, each learning that the other has a deep secret that can never be revealed.
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Let Us Descend describes a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation. A journey that is as beautifully rendered as it is heart wrenching, the novel is “[t]he literary equivalent of an open wound from which poetry pours” (NPR). Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the listener’s guide. As she struggles through the miles-long march, Annis turns inward, seeking comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother.
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Usually I enjoy an author reading…
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Bewilderment
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Theo Byrne is a promising young astrobiologist who has found a way to search for life on other planets dozens of light years away. He is also the widowed father of a most unusual nine-year-old. His son, Robin, is funny, loving, and filled with plans. He thinks and feels deeply, adores animals, and can spend hours painting elaborate pictures. He is also on the verge of being expelled from third grade for smashing his friend's face with a metal thermos.
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Not Usually a Richard Powers Fan
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Migrations
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Franny Stone has always been the kind of woman who is able to love but unable to stay. Leaving behind everything but her research gear, she arrives in Greenland with a singular purpose: to follow the last Arctic terns in the world on what might be their final migration to Antarctica. Franny talks her way onto a fishing boat, and she and the crew set sail, traveling ever further from shore and safety. But as Franny’s history begins to unspool - a passionate love affair, an absent family, a devastating crime - it becomes clear that she is chasing more than just the birds.
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Fascinating
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What listeners say about Lila
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Maria
- 04-18-17
Great read
Beautiful story. Very insightful author. Well performed but a little more dramatic than necessary at moments.
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- Sandra
- 01-13-16
Marvelous writer of a wonderful story
Rounds out the stories told in Gilead and Home beautifully. Plus, her writing is gorgeous.
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- sr
- 02-15-16
Lila
A bit slow in the first 3-4 chapters. The author does an excellent job with character development. Her writing style is colorful and descriptive, which is delightful.
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- Saeed S.
- 12-26-22
Disapointed
I really struggled to finish the book. The story was not at all what I expected.
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Performance
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- Greg
- 09-05-23
Hard to follow
It was difficult for me to tell when Lila was in her head and when life was actually happening. The book never quite reached a climax. I kept expecting something exciting to happen but it never did. This book was just ok for me.
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- MURRAY
- 09-15-15
"Salvation by grace"
Calvinism in reference to "predestination" was cited in the first two books ("Gilead" and "Home") including a a passage in "HOME" describing Lila's piqued interest of the subject during a porch interpretation setting the stage for this book. Lila" is a book that will stay with you long after the last read or listened to word: melancholy, heartbreaking, still with elements of hope and hard driven faith and yes...predestination/predetermination or "fate". The narrator captured all the characters nuances. I am hoping for one more "Gilead" book.
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2 people found this helpful
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- William
- 10-18-21
One of Robinson’s best
I’d read all of Ms. Robinson’s novels prior to “Jack” other than “Lila” and thought I would listen to this simply to re-engage in the world of Gilead before picking up her newest book. What a revelation! “Lila” is her best since “Housekeeping” and may exceed that masterpiece. It is thoughtful, compassionate, spiritual without preaching and such a warm and hopeful book. Highly recommended!
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- kathleen l. Torres
- 02-23-24
Masterful portrayal of trauma and shame and the road to healing.
Rarely does an author capture the reality of trauma and pain and how they interfere with connection and joy. A beautiful, quiet, and gentle book for the ages. The performance was perfect. Although the book is grounded in Christian traditions and teachings, its message about the difficult path to healing is for everyone.
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- Joe Kraus
- 10-07-15
As Good As It Gets
What about Maggie Hoffman’s performance did you like?
It's hard to pinpoint, but hard to forget. She has a gentle voice and a slight Southern lilt that accents the entire story.
Any additional comments?
Having loved and admired Gilead and Home, I was a little nervous about Lila, wondering whether Robinson could possibly live up to the high standards she’d set for herself in the Gilead novels. The first several pages had me disappointed – Lila in a setting very different from the Gilead I’d come to feel I knew very well – and then the lights switched on: it became clear to me that the point of Lila is that she has no history. At best, she has snatches of memory, but they’re deeply personal, without names that have consequence. (The name she takes is a mistake, an accidental appropriation of the first name of the woman who kidnaps her as a child, and at least one later person thinks she is Norwegian because of it.) She is, in other words, a blank book.
That’s an intriguing premise on its own, and Robinson does some striking things with it. Lila has so little sense of who she is or where she’s been that she has to discover, almost in literal fashion (as she learns its name only late in childhood) the United States of America. She is a latecomer who is also a native, someone unmistakably of the nation and yet needing to learn bit by bit what that means. And she does that learning through her early travels and through her later conversations with Ames over the Bible. She is, again almost literally, a child of God, someone profoundly innocent and yet perpetually threatened by the world.
I’d call that a success on its own terms if that all this were. Put it in conversation with Gilead, though, and it’s mind-blowing. To my eyes at least, Gilead is the story of a man trying to negotiate a too-thick history surrounding him. He has to try to live up to the legacy of his abolitionist grandfather, a man who has almost certainly committed murder in the name of freeing the slaves, and the simultaneous legacy of his pacifist father who rejected that violence. Ames has lived too long in his town, outlived all that originally defined him with the sole exception of Boughton, his life-long friend and fellow minister. They have had a deep and rich friendship (and that friendship is one of the great literary inventions I’ve come across in at least the last decade) but it has always been framed through text, through their shared and diverging senses of what scripture tells them to do in this odd post-World War II world.
Anyway, Ames is a man steeped in history, a man so aware of it – and simultaneously so aware of his imminent departure from it through death – that he creates a manuscript to record it for his son who is as yet too young to learn it firsthand. He cannot escape text, even as he understands himself to be slowly dying; he writes of his life for his son, a life so steeped in history that he can’t frame it through the experience of his own personal history.
When you put those two into conversation – Gilead and Lila – it becomes the same story told with entirely different premises, one so dependent on history it can’t understand itself without it and the other so empty of history that it cannot initially find its bearings. Throw in the terrific ethical complications of Home, where we learn that Ames, while still deeply intent on being a good man, has not always managed to be the decent person his full faith calls him to be. (I’m giving Home short shrift; it’s as beautiful as the others, and it negotiates history more at the level of the family and the community rather than in the generational scope of Gilead or the narrowly personal of Lila.)
As if all that weren’t enough, Ames is such a staggering decent and ethical presence that he finds a way to enter into conversation with Lila in a way that is not condescending. In an America of Biblical literalists who claim direct access to the divine – and who have more or less successfully hijacked the mantle of the great mainline Protestant traditions that built so much of the American ethic – Ames comes across as almost too good to be true: a man whose deep self-doubt is only barely conquered by his even deeper religious faith.
He discovers a belated chance at happiness in his meeting with Lila, and he makes the most of it, redeeming her from the mystery of her childhood and the ignorance of history. He does so only slowly and imperfectly, and only through his inspiring patience and love. In all, he comes across as a latter day Protestant saint, one of those quiet and pious people unsullied by sanctimony, who, always rare, would be nearly unrecognizable in an America that treats religion as a checklist of socio-political positions or, worse, a badge of unassailable license to judge others.
There’s a greatness in Ames, and it rubs off on all who enter his orbit. He isn’t perfect, but the beauty of his faith is that he recognizes that sooner and more deeply than anyone else. I find Gilead and Lila together echoing one of my favorite novels of all time, Anthony Trollope’s The Warden, for the way it makes a good man’s faith something palpable in a world that can barely recognize it.
Bottom line, Robinson has really done it. If she isn’t the greatest American writer of the moment, then I don’t know who is. (Maybe, still, the very different Jonathan Lethem?)
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- MaryAnn
- 02-26-18
I like good literature which often means feeling sad but
In this almost painfully beautiful novel, there is enough good, and enough love to make up for all of the pain and ugliness Lili experiences.
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