The long-awaited third novel in Marilynne Robinson’s beloved Gilead series, Lila was released last year to an enthusiastic reception by both readers and critics. And there’s no doubt about it – this is a quality novel, as reflected by its place on the Man Booker longlist this year.
For lovers of Gilead and Home, this will be a worthy close to the canon, a beautifully realised culmination of the story of John Ames and those who circle around him. I wonder, though, if it will resonate as deeply for newcomers to the Gilead cycle. I think it is a strong and captivating book on its own merits, but Lila alone – Lila without the backstory of having been inside John Ames’ head in his achingly lovely tale – might not quite carry.
As a quick catch-up for those not familiar: Gilead is the story of, and told by, John Ames, a third-generation Congregationalist minister of a little town called Gilead in Iowa. Ames is writing to his 9-year-old son, Robby; an elderly man at Robby’s birth, Ames knows he won’t live to see his son grown, and Gilead is his confessional and devotional to his son, narrating not just his own life, but those of his father and grandfather (both also Congregationalist pastors in Gilead).
Ames describes his life’s loneliness, his vocation, his late-coming love for Lila, and his mingled delight and sorrow in his son, all contained within a plot in which not very much happens and yet the world is entrapped inside. The reappearance in Gilead of Ames’ best friend, Presbyterian minister Robert Boughton’s, son Jack, the black sheep of that family, and Ames’ jealousy of Jack’s relationship with Lila, provides the only contemporaneous tension in the entire book, and it’s fairly mild at the best of times. Yet, for all that, Gilead is a book that few if any readers have described as boring; Robinson knows just where she’s going at all times.
Gilead is a special book to many Americans (including President Obama, who lists it among his favourite works of fiction). There are many reasons for this abiding fondness. Robinson’s extraordinarily vivid portrait of grandfather Ames, a militant abolitionist before and during the Civil War, and her exploration of the role of faith in that conflict, is highly potent for many readers. Her acute understanding of American small-town life in the first part of the twentieth century resonates with others. Somewhat surprisingly, her restoration of nuance to the popular understanding of the works of John Calvin has also been cited as a key factor in the success of Gilead as a text.
Beyond all other reasons, though, I loved (and still love) Gilead because of its protagonist. Like Anne Tyler, Robinson appears to believe in the essential goodness of people; in Ames, she gave her readers a character who was at once profoundly, genuinely virtuous – in the full meaning of that word – and also fascinating, complex, and lovable. That is a seriously difficult feat to pull off, especially in first-person narration, and it’s why Gilead is such a triumph of its type.
So, on to Lila.
Lila, Ames’ second wife and something of a cipher in Gilead, is the focus of this book, and while Robinson employs an intimate third-person voice rather than the first-person she used to such effect in Gilead, no one will exit this story without a profound feeling for the person Lila is, and the harshness of the events that shaped her.
The book takes an elliptical path through Lila’s life, ending just after the birth of Robby (her son with Ames), but weaving back and forth across the thirty or more years that precede it. A simple explanation would be that Lila is the counterpoint to Gilead, in that it completes the strange but compelling lovesong duet that is Ames’ and Lila’s marriage. Certainly, a lot of this book is concerned with Lila’s relationship with Ames, a man twice her age – how it comes to be, what she thinks and feels about it (and him), and where the faultlines might lie.
But much more than that, Lila is a story about class, and poverty, and deprivation, and the cruelties and unexpected kindnesses that life deals out to those that, these days, we’d call the 99%. Where Gilead is a powerful exposition of race in American history and life, Lila turns its attention to class, and, in particular, to rural class lines, and how deeply they bite when times are hard.
Lila’s life trajectory is one of uncompromising difficulty. Her abduction at the age of three from the house where she was being almost certainly dangerously neglected, and possibly abused, by the damaged, hard-nosed Doll, is just the beginning of her journey of privation and precarity. Indeed, Lila’s relationship with Doll, and her later uneasy awareness of Doll’s acts (murder and child theft), form a rusty nail around which Lila’s own hurts grow and fester. She loves Doll, and Doll certainly loves her, but love alone neither precludes nor prevents the infliction of pain, as Lila’s life underlines.
Doll, herself on the run from her past, takes the neglected child for her own and attaches them to a group of itinerant workers, led by the proud, surly Doane. Their lives, travelling from place to place following the seasonal farm work available, are tough – very tough – but not without moments of lightness; that is, until the Depression arrives, and suddenly everything is impossible.
This is, for want of a better descriptor, a very American novel – it’s stylistically quite unlike Steinbeck, but something about its mood, its voice, brought The Grapes of Wrath and Cannery Row very much to mind for me. Robinson doesn’t use much dialect, but her picture of the lives of itinerant workers in the 1920s and their awful, deadly precarity as the Great Depression sets in, is no less potent for that. Doane and his crew are not the most likeable of characters, but they are extremely believable – the lines of traumas past are traceable in their snarling, their casual pragmatic cruelties.
Lila’s emotional make-up is, above everything, characterised by a continual battle between pride and shame. Learning from the bitter, proud Doane, and her own adoptive mother’s closedness with strangers, Lila models an unwillingness to be dependent in any way, a resistance to asking for help or favours, coupled with a deep-seated shame in who and what she is. Put in this context, her short-lived stint in a St Louis whorehouse, where she quickly transitions herself from doleful and unsuccessful whore to extremely successful cleaning woman, makes sense. The misery and suffocation of the whorehouse is at once a way for Lila to allow her shame free rein, and also, oddly, a way to maintain her pride.
Lila’s eventual drift towards Iowa and her meeting of John Ames in Gilead is beautifully told, and provides a grace note to end this story. After much suffering comes a little, just a little, light, and it is good that it is so, for Lila. There is no unambiguous ending, here – nursing her young son, she’s thinking forward to the moment when she will leave Gilead, answering the call of the road, and wondering if she’ll take Robby with her or leave him behind. Lila’s damage isn’t undone by the touch of Ames’ hand and heart, but it is made easier to bear, and the novel ends in a place not so much hopeful as contemplative – a fitting way to close the circle of Gilead.