Review
I simply could not get
Gilead out of my head
after I read it. Neither, apparently, could
Marilynne Robinson, so she wrote it all over again
from another character's perspective, even replaying
some of the same scenes from a different corner of
the room.
The story at the heart of both books is Jack
Boughton's return to Gilead, Iowa, after twenty
painful years of self-exile, and the way his
presence deeply unsettles two families, his own and
that of his father's best friend, John Ames. Jack
sinned mightily in his youth when he took up and
then discarded a poor young girl in Gilead, leaving
her to care for the child that resulted from their
union, and it is almost as if Jack decided out of a
certain twisted integrity to live the rest...
Beyond the Book
Predestination
One of the crucial scenes in
Home, a
scene so important that it repeats and vastly
expands on a scene from
Gilead, occurs when
John Ames and his wife Lila visit the Boughtons for
dinner, and Jack discomfits them all by pressing
Reverend Ames for his views on the doctrine of
predestination. "Do you think some people are
intentionally and irretrievably consigned to
perdition?" he asks. He continues, "I've wondered
from time to time if I might not be an instance of
predestination. A sort of proof. If I may not
experience predestination in my own person. That
would be interesting, if the consequences were not
so...
