[ed. Gilead is one of my favorite books. See also: 'Lila': an exquisite novel of spiritual redemption and love.]
Marilynne Robinson tracks the movements of grace as if it were a wild animal, appearing for fleeting intervals and then disappearing past the range of vision, emerging again where we least expect to find it. Her novels are interested in what makes grace necessary at all—shame and its afterlife, loss and its residue, the limits and betrayals of intimacy.
In Lila, her brilliant and deeply affecting new novel, even her description of sunlight in a St. Louis bordello holds a kind of heartbreak: “When a house is shut up like that in the middle of a summer day the light that comes in through any crack is as sharp as a blade.” The notion that light might hurt—that illumination doesn’t always arrive as salvation, or that salvation might ache before it heals—echoes the novel’s articulation of a more personal kind of pain. “That was loneliness. When you’re scalded, touch hurts, it makes no difference if it’s kindly meant.”
Except it does make a difference, or it can. Witness a woman who has just been baptized by the man who will become her husband: “That was what made her cry. Just the touch of his hand.” Lila explores what that crying expresses—joy and scalding at once. In these pages, Robinson resists the notion of love as an easy antidote to a lifetime of suffering or solitude, suggesting that intimacy can’t intrude on loneliness without some measure of pain.
The novel, Robinson’s fourth, returns to the small-town world and church-steeped characters of its predecessors Gilead (2004) and Home (2008). Both of these novels examine the lifelong friendship between two Iowa preachers and the entwining of their families. Lila tells the story of the second wife of one of those ministers, John Ames, offering a portrait of a woman whose brutal, itinerant past makes it difficult for her to accept domesticity and love when they come. (...)
The premise of Lila is just that: a marriage catches husband and wife by surprise—both of them stunned not merely that they would love each other but that they would love anyone, that life still holds this for them. Ames, long entrenched in his identity as an aging widower, finds himself unexpectedly drawn to Lila—a much younger woman who appears in his small town of Gilead after years adrift, fending for herself. “I don’t trust nobody,” she tells him. To which he replies, aptly enough, “No wonder you’re tired.” (...)
Lila takes as its core concern what might have constituted, in another narrative, a happy ending: two lonely souls who never expected happiness somehow finding it. But Robinson’s quest is to illuminate how fraught this happiness is, shadowed by fears of its dissolution and the perverse urge to hasten that dissolution before it arrives unbidden.
In Lila, her brilliant and deeply affecting new novel, even her description of sunlight in a St. Louis bordello holds a kind of heartbreak: “When a house is shut up like that in the middle of a summer day the light that comes in through any crack is as sharp as a blade.” The notion that light might hurt—that illumination doesn’t always arrive as salvation, or that salvation might ache before it heals—echoes the novel’s articulation of a more personal kind of pain. “That was loneliness. When you’re scalded, touch hurts, it makes no difference if it’s kindly meant.”
Except it does make a difference, or it can. Witness a woman who has just been baptized by the man who will become her husband: “That was what made her cry. Just the touch of his hand.” Lila explores what that crying expresses—joy and scalding at once. In these pages, Robinson resists the notion of love as an easy antidote to a lifetime of suffering or solitude, suggesting that intimacy can’t intrude on loneliness without some measure of pain.
The novel, Robinson’s fourth, returns to the small-town world and church-steeped characters of its predecessors Gilead (2004) and Home (2008). Both of these novels examine the lifelong friendship between two Iowa preachers and the entwining of their families. Lila tells the story of the second wife of one of those ministers, John Ames, offering a portrait of a woman whose brutal, itinerant past makes it difficult for her to accept domesticity and love when they come. (...)
The premise of Lila is just that: a marriage catches husband and wife by surprise—both of them stunned not merely that they would love each other but that they would love anyone, that life still holds this for them. Ames, long entrenched in his identity as an aging widower, finds himself unexpectedly drawn to Lila—a much younger woman who appears in his small town of Gilead after years adrift, fending for herself. “I don’t trust nobody,” she tells him. To which he replies, aptly enough, “No wonder you’re tired.” (...)
Lila takes as its core concern what might have constituted, in another narrative, a happy ending: two lonely souls who never expected happiness somehow finding it. But Robinson’s quest is to illuminate how fraught this happiness is, shadowed by fears of its dissolution and the perverse urge to hasten that dissolution before it arrives unbidden.
by Leslie Jamison, Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Clay Rodery
