Gilead is a masterpiece. Such beautiful writing you are fortunate to read perhaps once in 15 years. Marilynne Robinson wrote Housekeeping in 1980, then went without writing another book for another decade before stunning us with the luminous Gilead in 2004. She was slightly faster with her latest book, Home - a sort of sequel to Gilead, which was published last year.
What makes Gilead such a modern classic? Marilynne Robinson doesn't just write, she makes prose seem the noblest desire of man. She touches each word with the brush of a poem, and laces each page with such wisdom that you realize even as you turn the page that you are not just reading but meditating. At the end of his long and eventful life, Reverend John Ames, begins writing a series of letters to his six-year old son. Those letters are meant to be Ames' memories to his son, who he knows will never know his father well. Ames though is not like me, sick of the decay in life, but in love with the grandeur of life:
So often I have seen the dawn come and the light flood over the land and everything turn radiant at once, that word 'good' so profoundly affirmed in my soul that I am amazed I should be allowed to witness such a thing.
Ames has lived a life of grace, and before he leaves he needs to find it within himself to make room for one who he had scorned earlier in life - Jack, the son of his oldest and dearest friend. How Ames moves through own personal turmoil and reaches grace forms the crux of the novel. It is a novel that is a prayer. It is a novel that isn't a novel at all. It is just a wise prayer on Life from one of the finest prose writers of this generation.
Light is constant, we just turn over in it. So every day is in fact the selfsame evening and morning.
Verdict: Classic.
Rating: 4.9/5
