Race and Redemption in Marilynne Robinson’s Home

Phenomenal, unbelievable, awesome: Home is one of those books I cannot recommend enough. In many ways a quiet, boring affair, much like Gilead before it, Home is so deeply packed with life, lived and felt, that it expands inside us like the impression of tree does, the moment we stop walking and start to give it the attention that its complexity and majesty undoubtedly deserves. Home takes place almost contemporaneously to Gilead, and the characters are shared between the two works, but the tone is very different. Gilead had seen the aging Reverend Ames writing letters full of love to his young son, consigning his own failures and guilts mostly to the margins. But Home, which takes us into the home of Ames’s friend Reverend Boughton as it deals with the return of a prodigal son, Jack, and a failed daughter, Glory, is a much more ambivalent tale.

The book is filled with tensions, with guilt, with shame, with pain. But at the same time it shines with the radiance of love, conditional and unconditional, and faith and grace. Unlike Gilead, where Ames’s occasional digressions on doctrinal matters such as baptism may have turned off readers with limited exposure to the Christian tradition, Home is a much more down-to-earth book in terms of its religious fundament. The central questions concerning redemption and grace are, I hope, a little more palatable to people, and more relevant to their own lives.

Glory

“Home to stay, Glory! Yes!” Her father said, and her heart sank.

The opening line of Home is brutal, and immediately informs us of the pain at the centre of the novel. Glory is the youngest daughter of Reverend Robert Boughton, youngest of eight children, and almost forty when the book begins in the late 1950s. Where other brothers and sisters have made successful marriages, or started successful careers, Glory worked as a teacher while engaged in a long courtship with a man who ultimately abandoned her. Apparently married, she could not even return to her teaching job. And so she has returned home, the only place that will offer her a refuge.

Her father, Reverend Boughton, is not the sprightly, young-at-heart man that Ames was. He spends most of Home being carried from chair to bed to chair. He retired from the pulpit ten years before the story begins, and his mind has declined where Ames’s remains nimble. But he is determined to make his home be a place where his children are welcome, and to show them the unconditional love of parents towards their children, no matter what they have done. Glory has come home, and she doesn’t really know what to do with herself, so she gives herself up to her father, caring for him as best she can, cooking and cleaning and doing the practical chores he is too weak to do. But she is desperately lonely. In the town she grew up in, all she has is the radio for company.

The Prodigal Son

That is until her father receives a letter from Jack. Jack is the prodigal son, the vanisher – he hasn’t been home in twenty years. As a child he was the only Boughton to scorn the church and steal and hide away. Eventually, he turned to alcohol too. What hangs over him, at least in the eyes of others, are two particular acts, committed long enough ago. The first is that he seduced and then abandoned a young girl, whose child later died; the second is that he did not return home for his mother’s funeral either. But he is his father’s son, and Boughton is determined to show him kindness.

The letter that arrives says Jack will be home soon. Boughton’s joy is so simple, so pure: “This letter is from Jack,” he said. “I know his hand. This is his hand… I’ll be needing a handkerchief, Glory, if you don’t mind. They’re in the top right-hand drawer… So we know he’s alive. That’s really something.”

And though he delays, and sends further letters, Jack does eventually come:

Then they heard bedsprings and their father calling, “Do we have company, Glory! I believe we do! Yes!” And then the slippered feet and the cane.

Robinson has an eye for the perfect detail. The action of Home takes place almost entirely within the walls of the Boughton home, and between these three people. But Robinson uses every sense, every minor gradation of feeling, to paint an extraordinary picture of family life in all its painful, wondrous, complexity.

Jack

Jack is back for his own reasons. For Glory, her older brother’s return is in a way a blessing. “At least I know what is required of me know, and that is something to be grateful for”. They have not seen each other for years, and Home is a record of intimacy gained, lost, fought for. Where Glory was duped, Jack is guilty. Most of all, he is battling against the notion of predestination, the idea that his life has already been decided for him, and that no matter what he may do he is doomed to hellfire because of something incorrect in his nature, in the very nature that God had given to him. He is a modern day Ivan Karamazov, knowledgeable about God and the Bible but unable to accept them for his own reasons, even as he rages against the despair stemming from having a terrible black hole inside him.

Jack comes home, he tends to the garden, he fixes the family car. He drinks, he hides, he hurts himself. His alcoholism is one part of his character, but in a way, as an addiction it sums up the heart of his problem. Anyone who has faced addiction will know the way that it can feel like predestination to fall back into old habits. No matter how we try, it seems as if an external force, like a cruel god, drags us back towards our vices. When faced with addiction, it’s sometimes impossible to feel that we can ever change, that we can ever right our course. While the two reverends discuss the thorny nature of predestination within their respective churches, it is Lila, Ames wife (and heroine of Robinson’s third Gilead novel), who steps up to reassure Jack. “A person can change. Everything can change.”

Like Jack, Lila has spent most of her life as an outcast. But after she meets Ames, something we only really hear about vaguely in Gilead, her life changes for the better. She is, in a way, saved. Does Jack redeem himself? Does Jack get saved? I’m not sure these questions are the point of Home. Jack comes home, and he leaves again. Life is not neatly tied up, and Home recognises that. In Jack’s story – here, in Gilead, and no doubt in Robinson’s latest novel, Jack –what matters is the process. Jack’s life is a swinging between salvation and perhaps, as he claims, perdition. And in our own lives, full of mistakes and guilt and yet bursting with beauty and always with the possibility of making things right again, Jack appears as a thoroughly human, thoroughly sad, brother.

Race and Religion in Home

Last summer I read a lot of books about race, but Home is probably more effective than any of them. At the end of Gilead we learn about why Jack is interested in racial tensions, and in Home this information is once again saved for the end. But early on, when Glory finds him reading W. E. B. DuBois, we have a sense that even though the village of Gilead is made up of traditional rural white Iowans, race will someway figure in the novel. Later, to entertain their father, Glory and Jack get him a TV set. Home is set during the height of the American civil rights movement, and Jack has spent a lot of time in the South. His father, meanwhile, appears scarcely to have even left his state.

Now, I confess, being not an American, I know little about the civil rights movement, so I may get a few bits wrong. As they watch the television, and read about protests in the newspaper, a division appears in the family.

After reading about white police with riot sticks attacking black peaceful demonstrators, Boughton speaks to calm his son: “There’s no reason to let that sort of trouble upset you. In six months nobody will remember one thing about it.”

But Jack replies. “Some people will probably remember it.”

Boughton is a religious man, but he is not necessarily a wise one. His vision of the world is small. The idea that the African Americans who were suffering may have slightly longer memories than his own, watching them on the television, is not something that comes naturally to him. It is less hypocrisy, than ignorance, but it remains a problem. When Jack cries “Jesus Christ” after a particularly brutal moment, Boughton’s anger is aimed at his blasphemy, rather than the actions of the police. Eventually, he attempts to be conciliatory. “Young people want the world to change and old people want it to stay the same. And who is to judge between thee and me? We have to forgive each other.”

At times like this Robinson describes Boughton as “statesmanlike” – she uses this adjective several times, and in a way that is far more ironic than anything else. Boughton asks who can judge, but the answer, for readers, is clearly that we can. We know better, we know now the suffering of black Americans thanks to social media and publicised brutalities. We know that the civil rights movement has not finished, and Boughton’s faux-conciliatory remarks which paper-over real and legitimate suffering are just the same ill-judged remarks we hear today, from certain sections of society. The blacks were rioting, they were violent. But even when disproved we continue to hold fast to these lies. I don’t mean to disregard the violence of certain protests last year, only to indicate that there is a continuity not just in terms of the problems, but also in how they are represented and dealt with.

Robinson’s story reveals that underlying hypocrisy. Yes, we should avoid judgement in many things. But in matters of racial justice, at least in the sense that we shouldn’t tolerate brutality, refraining from judgement becomes a moral stance. And we know, I hope we know, enough to know that things that were wrong then, in the 1950s, must still be wrong now.

Conclusion

Gilead was in many ways a paean to the blessings of the everyday little things that make life so magical but which we often pass over without a thought. And Home is filled with that same, slightly religious sentiment. But Home goes further than that, in that it asks moral questions too. Are we managing to be good people, even as we enjoy the world? Is there a chasm between our beliefs and our actions? Are we Christians or whatever to all people, or only to a few? In its portrayal of Jack’s tortured complexity, both his good and his bad, and his struggle for what perhaps we could call redemption, Home is a much more gritty book than its predecessor. But it is a book whose message is every bit as important as that of Gilead. Perhaps, unfortunately, given the world we currently live in, it may be even more so.

But either way it’s fantastic, brilliant, and well worth reading.