Home Is Where the Hurt Is

It's a hard thing to admit to being bored by Marilynne Robinson. She's a tremendous power in American fiction. She's the author of Housekeeping, a transcendently weird, overpoweringly sad book that was a finalist for the Pulitzer in 1982, and Gilead, which won it in 2005, almost a quarter-century later. When Robinson writes--as she does in her new novel, Home (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 325 pages)--that the white hair of a sleeping old man is "like harmless aspiration, like a mist given off by the endless work of dreaming," her similes are so precise and so beautiful that one knows one should not be bored. In her essays, Robinson is a ferocious advocate of the life of the mind and the spirit, and one suspects that if one possessed the virtues she celebrates, probably justly, one would not be bored by Home. And yet one is.

Home is a pendant to Gilead, or maybe a reverse-angle instant replay of it: both books are set in the 1950s in the small town of Gilead, Iowa, and are concerned with many of the same characters and events. Robert Boughton, an elderly Presbyterian minister, is dying. A widower and father of eight, Boughton's powers are fading, though he is still full of a shaky heartiness that causes him to end most of his sentences with an exclamation point. His daughter Glory, unmarried in her late 30s, has come home to take care of him, partly because she doesn't have much else to do in the wake of a failed engagement. "She had dreamed of a real home for herself and the babies, and the fiancé, a home very different from this good and blessed and fustian and oppressive tabernacle of Boughton probity and kind intent." Such a home is not to be hers.

Soon another bird returns to the nest: Robert's prodigal son Jack. (What else would he be named?) Jack is a notoriously unemployable drunkard who in his youth stole prolifically, then fathered a child out of wedlock, then fled Gilead. He hasn't been back in 20 years. "I failed as a lowlife," he cracks. "But not for want of--application." A tender, troubled soul, Jack feels desperately guilty about his misdeeds, but at the same time he finds his family's Christian forgiveness unbearable. Glory and Robert are furious with Jack, but at the same time they ache with love for him. All three of them vibrate uneasily in the close quarters of Robert's time-capsule house, unsure of how to reconcile or whether they even want to. If Gilead were located a few miles farther south, the situation would be Faulknerian. As it is, it could pass for a more austere, lyrical prequel to The Corrections.

Boredom is not the only feeling Home inspires. Awe is another one. As writers go, Robinson is among the superpowered. She moves easily in and out of minds that to a lesser writer would be solid and opaque, evoking their smallest, most intricate emotions with master-level eloquence. But at heart, Home is Jack's book, or it should be, and therein lies the problem. He's charming enough--God knows what the Boughton family did for the 20 years he was gone, since he's the only one in the house who can make a proper joke. He just isn't quite real. It's impossible to locate in Jack the anger and lust that drove him to defile the local women and then skip town, and Robinson leaves utterly abstract whatever misdeeds kept him busy for two decades in the flesh pits of (gasp!) St. Louis, Mo. He's one of these erudite wastrels like Stephen Dedalus who quote scripture freely, but unlike Dedalus, you can't imagine him touching anybody, even himself. He's more like Lovelace, the libertine villain in Clarissa: a devout person's idea of what a scoundrel might be like. And if we don't know, really know, why Jack left Gilead, we cannot feel what it costs him to come home.

There are grand things in Home. Perfect things, even. The way that Gilead is both idyll and prison to Glory, the birthplace of all her hopes and their tomb. Robert's long, ungraceful dive into death--"Jesus never had to be old," he complains. But the problem of Jack leaves a slackness at the heart of the book, and Robinson never takes it in. Two-thirds of the way through, you're desperate for Jack and Glory to fall into bed together, even if they are brother and sister, just as a gesture of Christian charity toward a reader starved for incident. It's a strange thing for a novel to be full of so much wisdom and craft and still be so unsatisfying. It's as if Robinson somehow understands everything about people--their astounding strength, their pathetic weakness--but has forgotten something essential about readers.