This meditative novel, which takes place concurrently with Gilead, focuses on Reverend Robert Boughton’s daughter, Glory. In the mid-1950s, Glory, 38, returns home from a failed engagement to care for her dying father, John Ames’s (from Gilead) closest friend. She finds unexpected salvation from her prodigal brother Jack, who left Gilead two decades earlier amid scandal and has returned home to search for peace and forgiveness from his father. Stories of Jack’s vagrancy, his position as his father’s favored child, his love for a black woman, and his spiritual suffering slowly emerge. But as the family tentatively tries to forgive, trust, and love once again, they realize they must each still find their own ways home.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 325 pages. $25. ISBN: 0374299102
Los Angeles Times
"Both are books of such beauty and power that they ultimately beggar description. If I cannot do Home justice in describing it, I can, at least, commend it to you with my whole heart." Emily Barton
Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Nothing much happens in this wrenching book of lambent moral beauty, and yet everything important in life is at stake here: sin, forgiveness, revenge, fate, hope, disillusionment, lives ‘laid low by grief, as if it were a sickness,’ and the shimmering possibility of grace. … An urgent question resonates on every page: What is a good life? It is a question that Jack, Glory and Ames ponder with deep seriousness." Brigitte Frase
Boston Globe
"The book is less about the newly returned Jack’s being forgiven than the recently returned Glory’s forgiving Jack, and herself, and her family, and finding a new kind of hope in the process. … But there are also many surprising turns and pivots in the plot line that ratchet up the tension." Tom Montgomery-Fate
Christian Science Monitor
"The result is a work that’s less luminous [than Gilead] but more devastating. … Robinson uses Jack’s visit home to conduct a thoughtful, exceedingly patient, examination of the nature of grace and perdition." Yvonne Zipp
New Yorker
"The novel quietly mobilizes the major Biblical stories of father and son: Esau, denied his birthright, begging for a blessing from his father; Joseph, reunited, finally, with his father, Jacob; the Prodigal Son, most loved because most errant. What propels the book, and makes it ultimately so powerful, is the Reverend Boughton, precisely because he is not the soft-spoken sage that John Ames is in Gilead." James Wood
Chicago Sun-Times
"Marilynne Robinson is so powerful a writer that she can reshape how we read; her novels are engineered to slow us down, attune us to silences, guide us toward subtle but meaningful changes in phrasing. … Home’s story echoes Gilead as well, which gives the new novel the feel of a reprise and not a full-blown work in itself." Mark Athitakis
Washington Post
"The publisher claims these two novels can be read separately, but that’s not fair to the profound relationship between them nor, I think, to the way Home depends on its predecessor for detail and resonance. … Even more than their stylistic beauty, what’s miraculous about Gilead and Home is their explicit focus on spiritual affliction, discussed in the hard terms of Protestant theology." Ron Charles
New York Times
"As Gilead demonstrated, Ms. Robinson is better at describing spiritual yearnings and the metaphysics of faith than she is at mapping complicated psychological relationships. … [A] static, even suffocating narrative in which very little is dramatized, and much is recalled secondhand, and it makes the characters, especially Jack, seem terribly self-absorbed." Michiko Kakutani
Critical Summary
"Writing one novel about a minister’s family is asking for trouble; writing a second seems downright unrepentant, the kind of misjudgment that could land a reputable literary author in a Christian bookstore or with a cozy series on the BBC," notes Ron Charles in the Washington Post. We would have said "isolate" rather than "land," but he and other reviewers did feel the need to assure their audiences that Home will appeal to a wide literary readership. Although framed by a story of spiritual homelessness, Home communicates universal themes, embodied by Jack’s rebellion and his complex relationships with Glory, Ames, and his father. Like Gilead, the novel ponders kindness, forgiveness, and grace through luminous, even prayerful, writing, though it is a quieter, less-colorful story overall. Some backstory may throw off readers unfamiliar with Gilead, but with the exception of Michiko Kakutani, critics called Home a remarkable achievement.
Home, by Marilynne Robinson
By AvramChetronWed, 03/17/2010 - 18:57
I find that most of the reviewers of Home have missed the point that was most important to me.
I loved Gilead but I found this follow up to be disappointing because, despite many reviewers comments to the contrary, there is little grace portrayed in this family, little redemption, and almost no learning or character developed through the story's end. Rather than seeing the book as a treatment of spiritual themes, I experienced it as limited to religious themes, questions of theology and abstract principles that somehow never cross into the actual issues of daily life that the protagonists wrestle with.
The "old man" is completely tactless at healing his family's wounds, although he is obsessed with the task above all else in his life. He never understands the simplest lessons of forgiveness although he can talk all day about it. Glory's miserable fate at the book's end makes me want to grab her by the collar and shake her, because she has absolutely no will to live her own life. I can't sympathize with her plight because she has early on resigned her responsibility for herself.
And what are we to learn from Jack? He can be very nice, but he seems to be missing some fundamental human quality, something basic to citizenship, to family membership. He makes attempts, trying to establish contact and respect with Ames, learning to respect his family's needs and his obligations to them, but when put to any real test, he dissolves. He and his father agree that somehow he's never felt at home, like he belongs in or to his family, yet what good comes from this acknowledgment? If there is no redemption, no lesson possible here, then the reader can hope that Jack and his family can go on with their lives without wallowing in the unjustice of it all, the pathos of their fate, and not let it destroy them. Apparently they can't.
Overall, this doesn't convey spiritual principles, it doesn't give uplift, and it leaves a hollow moral bankruptcy and helplessness as an aftertaste.