Product Description

Hundreds of thousands of readers were enthralled and delighted by the luminous, tender voice of John Ames in Gilead, Marilynne Robinson's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Now comes HOME, a deeply affecting novel that takes place in the same period and same Iowa town of Gilead. This is Jack's story. Jack - prodigal son of the Boughton family, godson and namesake of John Ames, gone twenty years - has come home looking for refuge and to try to make peace with a past littered with trouble and pain. A bad boy from childhood, an alcoholic who cannot hold down a job, Jack is perpetually at odds with his surroundings and with his traditionalist father, though he remains Boughton's most beloved child. His sister Glory has also returned to Gilead, fleeing her own mistakes, to care for their dying father. Brilliant, loveable, wayward, Jack forges an intense new bond with Glory and engages painfully with his father and his father's old friend John Ames.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #568 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04-16
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Review
'Her fiction attends with rapt attention to the "dear ordinary" breathing fresh air into the long-standing debates of American Protestantism' Kasia Boddy, DAILY TELEGRAPH 'A quietly moving novel of faith and forgiveness.' Amber Pearson, DAILY MAIL 'So finely wrought as to make the work of her more productive contemporaries seem tawdry by comparison ... The cadences of her prose have a resonant authority more like that of a great music rather than language. The effect is utterly haunting. The bad news is that is makes all other writing seem jejune for ages afterwards' Jane Shilling, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 'This is certainly a novel about faith and love. However, it is also a meditation on doubt and fear ... There is both a subtlety and a simplicity about her most powerful themes. She asserts the elusiveness of perfection, the foolishness of sever self-judgement and the unavoidable necessity of having to suffer in order to love ...The beauty of HOME is that it does not offer the counterfeit currency of certainty but proffers the under-valued coin of hope. That is its glory, too' HERALD 'Compelling' OBSERVER 'One of the saddest books I have ever loved' Sarah Churchwell, GUARDIAN

Review
'One of the saddest books I have ever loved'

Review
'A quietly moving novel of faith and forgiveness'

Customer Reviews

The prodigal son comes home 4.5 stars
'Home to stay, Glory! Yes!' her father said, and her heart sank. He attempted a twinkle of joy at this thought, but his eyes were damp with commiseration. 'To stay for a while this time!' he amended, and took her bag from her, first shifting his cane to his weaker hand.'

Marilynne Robinson's Home opens with retired minister Robert Broughton's youngest daughter reluctantly returning to her father's house, her childhood home - essentially to nurse him as he dies. She is one of eight children, the only one free to take care of him. She has brought her own secrets back to her house - her life has not followed the conventions of 1950s small town America. Her brother Jack, the 'ne'er do well' of the family, the son most beloved of the father, writes to say that he will be coming home after twenty years.

The prodigal returns with a hangover but seeks to make amends for the disgrace he brought to the family as a youngster. We gradually learn of his wrongdoings as a boy and snippets of his life since. Though he is not religious he turns to John Ames, also a minister and Robert Broughton's life long friend - and for whom Jack was named - for a blessing and redemption. Jack's life is clearly still complicated - there is a woman he writes to but something has gone wrong. As readers we understand, perhaps, more about his relationship with Della and the secret involved there than his family living in the same house are able to pick up.

Everything slows down in the middle of the novel as Jack looks for work, fixes the De Soto in the garage, works in the garden and avoids booze. Glory and Jack start to grow close though their shared work about the house and garden, through small kindnesses to each other and in sharing the care of their father. In a family where words and letters and books have always been important they do not talk much; communication is indirect and politeness and well-meaning gets in the way. Jack and Glory do tell each other more than either can tell their father.

The novel is strong on time and place. Jack has been living in St Louis and sympathises with the 'coloured' and in 1957 what appears to be the incipient civil rights movement. Gilead is small town America where Jack's disgrace was visited on the whole family. There is genteel poverty and there is the sense of life revolving around the church and home. As Robert Broughton comes to the end of his life it is Jack's immortal soul he is concerned for.

Though very different in style Home reminded me of Anne Enright's The Gathering where two siblings of a large family have a special bond, where the sister longs for her 'damaged' brother to come right, where there is the sadness of unrealised potential.

This novel stands alone but is a companion piece to Gilead, which was written from the point of view of letters from elderly John Ames to his six year old son, and covers much of the same period of time. We see now how John Ames and his namesake have misunderstood each other. I think the third person narrative style in Home works well. Though also a novel about fathers and sons Glory provides another point of view, another player in the family dynamics. Robert Broughton longs to forgive his son but can't quite manage to do it. Glory forgives him quickly and manages to wish more for him than she expects for herself.

I loved Housekeeping, was not fully enamoured of Gilead when it came out but will return to it after reading Home, which I thought was beautifully written and realised, though very very sad.

Another visit to Gilead
I mistakenly thought Marilynne Robinson's Home was a sequel to Gilead (2004). It's not. It's contemporaneous -- the same story from a different perspective, though knowledge of the earlier Pulitzer-winning novel is assumed. One almost wonders whether Home started life as a notebook for Gilead. Ever wondered what supporting characters in novels do when they're not on the page? No? Well now you can find out anyway. It's probably a good idea to leave all your expectations at the door with Home, as its markedly different to Robinson's previous novels.

Where Housekeeping (1980) and Gilead were masterful fictionalized memoirs that dove deep into their narrator's personal and family history, Home is a reasonably straightforward, third-person, temporally-continuous narrative. Jack Boughton arrives home after twenty years to live in the desolate house of his ailing minister father, Robert, and his heartbroken spinster sister, Glory.

Though the narration looks-in on the thoughts of Glory (now all but a servant to her father), Glory is primarily a spectator to the comings and goings of Jack, who is the central driving force in the plot. In his childhood, he fathered a child and ran away. He returns from his time in the wilderness disgraced, determined to win the support of his father and the Rev'd John Ames (his namesake and the narrator of Gilead), hoping against hope to build a settled life for himself in this isolated Iowa town, dreaming that his black wife will return to him from St Louis.

It sounds like the setup for a great novel. And it is. But that novel is Gilead. Home, though still good, pales in comparison. Housekeeping and Gilead are wonderful for their subjectiveness: their whimsical, unreliable narration, full of little reminisces, stories from long ago and (in Ames's case) offhand insights regarding theology. But Home is practically a study of boredom -- it's three miserable, ordinary people, living in an empty house. It's Big Brother 1956.

The book's strength is, unsurprisingly, Robinson's sensational descriptive prose. Though I was left nonplussed by Home, I still say without hesitation that Robinson is one of the best stylists of English I've ever come across, and the magician that wowed the world with Housekeeping is still in evidence here. Robinson can still write a stunning sentence, but this whole is less than the sum of its parts.

Slow, Dull and Unengaging
I had high hopes for 'Home' as it came recommended and the novel 'Gilead' had won so much acclaim.

I struggled through to 130 or so pages of the most turgid dialogue I've ever read. Every little nothing was stretched and spun out far beyond the limits of my patience, and all of it brimming with a stilted, false sense of contriteness by characters who aspire to being two dimensional. The father is obsequious and shallow, a religious man on the verge of death who rarely leaves his room except to apologise for the burden he's become. A 'poor me' character who wallows in the joyless self pity of his home; I found it impossible to empathise with him in any way. Then there's the prodigal son, I forget his name already, an alcoholic who returns home and the black sheep of the family. Apparently he's the sort of wild child loner his brothers and sisters both admired and resented to some degree, but there's nothing there. For some reason his hand is always going to his face - and no, I've no idea why either - as if that one tic imbues him with depth. Finally, there's Glory, the daughter who came home to look after her dying father and about whom both men gravitate - a considerable feat given her character has no real substance. I'd love to tell you more about the 'story' but after 100+ pages all that happens is the father wakes up, Glory makes some meals and the son waits for a phone call while fixing a car.

Life's too damned short to waste on such thin gruel.