I had a dream last night about Jack, the prodigal son of Reverend Boughton who plays a major role in the events of Marilynne Robinson’s novels Gilead and Home. This is quite extraordinary – I cannot think of another time I have ever dreamed of a literary figure – and it goes some way to suggest the sheer power that Robinson’s novels have over me. Jack does not feature in Lila, the third novel of the series, except in conversation, but his presence hangs over the book just as it does in the previous two. Instead, Lila is the story of Reverend Ames’s wife, a woman who we learned in Gilead just turned up one day in Ames’s church seeking shelter from the elements, later marrying him, in spite of his old age and their many differences.
Lila, like Jack, is an outsider. Through Lila’s memories the novel juxtaposes the story of her childhood and youth to the story of her courtship and marriage to Ames. As with Robinson’s other works, Lila can be accused of being boring – it is slow, often tender, and infused with wonder – but despite that, it is a very different novel to either Home or Gilead, though they mostly share the same small pool of characters. Here, the main questions are about the trust and the loneliness that can lie at the heart of existence.
Beginning
Robinson’s language is quite extraordinary. I remember being disappointed by her style while I was reading Housekeeping, her first novel, but I have never had that feeling with any of her other ones. What is true is that it is deceptively simple – Robinson does not use words that send us to the dictionary; rather, she uses words in combinations that send shivers down our spine. Take our encounter with Lila on the first page:
“The child was just there on the stoop in the dark, hugging herself against the cold, all cried out and nearly sleeping.”
“all cried out” – how simple the phrase, but how easily it captures the abjection of her situation! A little later we read how the people inside her house “fought themselves quiet” – Robinson makes her own language brutal, direct as the fighting itself. How much less powerful the phrase would be if it were “fought until they were quiet”. And the “themselves” is excellent too, hinting at the futility of the fighting – these people are only hurting themselves, they are destroying their own community, their own home.
Lila, aged about five, waits outside, where she is “saved” by Doll, an older woman, and taken away. Away from the family that does not care for her, Lila and Doll eventually join a group of roving workers, a ragtag bunch of rough young men and women. But first she gets a name – at home she had only learned to swear. At the time when Doll takes her away, she is so weak that she can barely walk, and the two of them stay with an unnamed woman, working for her until Lila begins to get her strength back. The woman suggests the name Lila: “I had a sister Lila. Give her a pretty name, maybe she could turn out pretty.”
“I got nowhere to be”
Lila’s life is not pretty. Lila meets Ames at the end of the 1940s, but her youth was spent during the years of the Great Depression. Where earlier the group she had gone with had managed to get by, once work dries up the group splits up and many turn to crime to survive. Doll, who acts as Lila’s mother, manages to get her a year at school, where Lila learns to read and write, but it is the only formal education she has. After working outside, she also spends time in a hotel and, terribly, a brothel. Lila’s time in the brothel is the most challenging section of the book to read, so soaked in despair is it. We have a real sense of just how trapped the women are there – financially, emotionally. Most significantly, they lose their names. Once again, Lila seems to have lost herself.
John Ames gives Lila a name – his own surname. She drifts into Gilead and takes shelter from a storm in his church, where she sees him performing baptism on a small girl, “wearing a white dress that spilled down over his arm”. Instead of leaving Gilead, Lila finds herself attacked by kindnesses, as Ames uses his position to give her work and support. Lila is almost feral when she arrives, so little of kindness has she received in her life. Doll is out of the picture by the time she reaches Gilead, so the only other memory of goodness is a school report she once received: “she has made remarkable progress”. Lila teaches us to look even at the “strays” as people deserving of love and affection by showing how these provide the water that helps people grow and flourish.
Lila, eternal drifter, ends up married, ends up pregnant. Yet the great tension in the novel is over whether she will truly stay. Although she grows under Ames’s care, and comes to love him and almost, perhaps, to trust him, still we are left questioning whether she can truly change her nature.
“Even now, thinking of the man who called himself her husband, what if he turned away from her? It would be nothing. What if the child was no child? There would be an evening and a morning. The quiet of the world was terrible to her, like mockery. She had hoped to put an end to these thoughts, but they returned to her, and she returned to them.”
We know, of course, that she decides to stay, because Lila is set before Home and Gilead. We have a feeling of the truth of it too, thanks to the beauty and joy and belonging that Robinson lets Lila feel – “if there was one thing she wished she could save from it all, it was the way it felt to walk along beside him”. At the same time, there is always a “but”. We do not know what will happen once Ames – aged 76 in Gilead – passes away. But we do know that Lila has grown, that the hardness of her heart has started to soften. There’s an extraordinary moment in Home where Jack is in agony at feeling his own wretchedness and damnation and it is Lila, the quiet one, who speaks up to tell him that people can change, that he can change. Lila does.
“Life on earth is difficult and grave, and marvellous”
Lila is wonderful in the truest sense of that word. As with her other novels, Robinson’s descriptions of nature are particularly lush, as if divinity is hiding behind the tree trunks: “There is a way trees stir before a rain, as if they already felt the heaviness”. The growing love and tenderness of Lila and Ames’s relationship is also something that is extraordinary. I kept sending the most ridiculous and sentimental messages to my friends while I was reading Lila. Robinson has a way of getting to me, of making the world so obviously imbued with religion that one feels silly not to agree with her, and embarrassed at one’s eyes whenever they do not reveal the beauty incarnate in every living thing.
Yet here is a review that is rather more critical of Robinson’s use of religion, and worth reading for that reason. I think Robinson’s fiction is amazing because it makes clear to an audience of non-believers or half-believers why religion can and should appeal to them. It has a clear sense of good and evil, of Man’s fallenness and of his potential redemption. The character of Jack is, as my dream indicates, a particularly special creation. For Robinson is aware that the world stretches beyond Gilead. One particularly impressive moment in Lila comes when she says to Ames that he doesn’t mind thinking about hell because he doesn’t know anybody who would ever go there. And it’s true – what can a man who has barely left his small town know? On a similar note, one thing I loved about Home was its treatment of race and racial politics.
Robinson, it might be said, is guilty of choosing her world sneakily, so that only the positive aspects of religion are emphasised. But this is not quite the aggressively closed world that Wendell Berry loves. One cannot say that Robinson is ignorant of religion’s complexities, or of the world’s. Doll kills a man, perhaps Lila’s own father. Lila works in a brothel. At one point we encounter a young man who believes he has killed his father. It is not that there is no damnation in Robinson’s world, so much as that for anyone with an ounce of good, redemption is always possible.
And so it should be.
Conclusion
Ultimately, I find myself struggling to write about Lila. There are many things I don’t feel qualified to talk about, most of them religious. As in Gilead, for example, there is a lot of discussion of baptism. The novel’s themes – the loneliness of Lila’s life, and her shame and guilt, are all better experienced than read about in my review. It is of course a book I recommend, but less so than the other two novels. There is a lot of bleakness here that is quite difficult to read, whereas a work like Gilead is more dominated by wonder. Home, I think it is fair to say, is the masterpiece – balancing wonder and bleakness together so perfectly. I am sure to read Jack itself, so you will not doubt here my thoughts on that a bit later too.
I can only hope that Robinson will continue writing, and that the inhabitants of Gilead will continue to grow.