I looked up from the closing pages of Lila, the third installment of novelist Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead series, and out at the lake where my children were splashing about in late-afternoon sun. As it inched toward the western Maryland hills, its light made lake-gazing a near-blinding challenge. And as Robinson’s tale wound towards its conclusion, I was beginning to feel short of breath, as dazzled by the brilliance of her writing as I was by the oblique light.
I realized my heart had become a sudden harbor for a thing of beauty, and the one thing I wanted to do was to share it. My sunburned 8- and 4-year-olds were not likely appreciators of this particular enthusiasm of mine, so I texted a friend, vaguely recalling our conversations about Robinson’s novels Home and Gilead, which are set in the same town and time period and feature the same characters. I’d had a tepid initial reaction to those books, although my friend had spoken well of them, suggesting I give Robinson’s work another chance.
“Lila is phenomenal,” I texted. “Have you read it?”
He had not. “I made it part of the way through Jack,” he replied. “Maybe because of all the people (like you) who kept telling me that Robinson was no good. ;)”
Somewhat chagrined, hoping I hadn’t actually said a writer who taught at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and received a Pulitzer, among other prestigious prizes, was “no good,” I apologized for any hasty conclusions I had drawn and tried to figure out what about Lila set it apart for me.
Lila has a shimmer, a light that creeps upward through trauma like the roses that curl up from the graves where the novel’s protagonist gardens as a kindness — or as a project of hope she can’t help but pursue — despite her lifelong tendency to craft exit strategies. Lila is a young woman with no attachments who arrives in Gilead and lingers in a shack on the edge of town after fleeing unpleasant circumstances in a nearby city. She tends the graves of the wife and infant of a widowed man she doesn’t really know. “Someday,” she thinks, “the old man would lie down beside his wife. And there she would be, after so many years, waiting in sunlight, all covered in roses.”
John Ames is this man, an aging minister. In time he becomes Lila’s unlikely husband and the father of her son. Gilead (2004), the first novel Robinson set in this fictional Iowa town, traces in epistolary style Ames’ near-to-death thoughts, composed for his 7-year-old son. (Lila, published in 2014, is a prequel.) Ames’ best friend is the Reverend Robert Boughton; Home (2008) details the lives of Boughton’s family, particularly what happens when Boughton’s estranged son Jack comes back to town as the minister himself faces death. Jack’s conflicts unsettle both older men, enough that the tensions of these relationships play a critical role in the two earlier novels.
When I read Gilead, and later, Home, I tucked them — perhaps unfairly — into the same mental space as Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter and Jayber Crow. While all four novels portray midcentury, small-town America, different questions undergird Berry’s and Robinson’s fiction. My reactions to each book were more intuitive than analytical. For me, Berry’s Port William, Kentucky, is a rose-colored refuge I’d like to visit, a place with just the right amount of brokenness to make it believable. I had less interest in an imaginary jaunt to Gilead, Iowa. Robinson’s town seems to exist in a sustained sepia-gray; Boughton and Ames are men for whom I could muster little affection, constantly caught up as they are in tormented wonderings about how to reconcile their notions of predestination with a wayward young man they ought to just love and forgive.
Lila has its fair share of tragedy and tension. Lila’s life is rooted in the dirt and despair of her fragmented, Dust Bowl childhood and spent in the care of an impoverished drifter, a wandering farm worker named Doll who whisks her away from abusive neglect. Doll has nearly nothing to offer Lila, and yet in sustaining the child’s initially fragile existence, offers everything. It is Doll who says to her, live. "Not once, but every time she washed and mended for her, mothered her as if she were a child someone could want.”
Doll gives Lila in affection and loyalty what she lacks in worldly goods, and roots in Lila an understanding that restlessness and despair are not what one ought to find at the end of all things. Thanks to her foster mother, Lila gets a taste of heaven and longs for more without realizing it. She knows only that her deepest desire is “to rest her head on a bosom more Doll’s than Doll herself, to feel trust rise up in her like that sweet old surprise of being carried off in strong arms, wrapped in a gentleness worn all soft and perfect.”
In Lila, Gilead is a refuge rather than a place of regret-tinged sorrow. Robinson laces swaths of gentle lyricism throughout the narrative, spoken in Lila’s matter-of-fact voice and set against the searing “glories of the Lord” highlighted in the excerpts from Ezekiel that Lila copies into a handwriting tablet.
It’s been years, but I need to turn back to Gilead and Home to appreciate what they accomplish. When I first read them, I was probably not experienced enough in suffering or in years to appreciate the nuances of those stories. Yet Lila took my breath away on first reading. It reminded me that even amid our own grit, in our own mediocre, middle-American Gileads, we may see glimmers of heaven.
For Lila, these glimmers are roses rising from a grave and blackberries bundled in a handkerchief — or the bunched-up sweater she steals to use as a pillow for reasons she can’t even explain to herself. Like Lila, most of us have souls that remain (in certain, more-or-less secret spaces) raw, uncertain and unsteady. And just as they do for Lila, the glimmers will come not in obvious ways, like the blinding light of late afternoon, but rather like the first, gentle hints of dawn, faint whispers of illumination that speak ever-so-softly in even the darkest of our nights.
Carla Galdo is a poet and essayist whose work has appeared in Humanum and Dappled Things. She lives with her family in Virginia.