Lila
By Marilynne Robinson,
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 272 pages, $26
In an interview with the Paris Review in 2008, Marilynne Robinson described how once she had finished writing a novel, she missed the characters: “I feel sort of bereaved.” That is why she keeps returning to them. We first met her elderly, “silvery” preacher, John Ames, in “Gilead” (2004), and then again in “Home” (2008), which told the story of Jack, the wayward son of Ames’s closest friend. Now we’re back in Robinson’s quiet Midwest once more to hear the tale of Lila, Ames’s new, much younger wife.
You could call the three books a trilogy, but that wouldn’t be right. Plot and chronology are irrelevant; the works coexist, symbiotic rather than sequential. Robinson has made a world — a place and its people — so palpable and full that each book can stand alone. The town of Gilead seems to exist beyond the author, enabling her to step in and out of it at will, telling any number of its stories.
Lila is the furious outsider, a woman whose hard life “is just written all over her face”, whose face isn’t pretty, however much they once tried to polish her up in a St Louis brothel. She was rescued as a neglected child by Doll, an old woman who cared for her and took her on the road with an itinerant gang. They worked in the fields and slept beneath the stars and for a year, Doll managed to put Lila through school, so she could learn to read and discover the name of her country, the United States of America. “Doll said, ‘Well I spose they had to call it something.’” Eventually they parted, and Lila, after miserable years alone, found her way by chance to Gilead and an unlikely husband.
Robinson doesn’t tell it like this, in a straight line. We inhabit, indirectly, Lila’s mind as it leaps from her present discomfort as the preacher’s pregnant wife to raw memories of her shambolic childhood. In Lila, Robinson has created perhaps the fiercest test of Ames’s faith, and therefore her own, the Christian belief that forms and infuses all the Gilead books. Before Lila meets Ames, the Lord hasn’t figured in her life: “If there was a Good Lord […] Doll had never mentioned him.” Now Lila discovers that all she has known and loved — Doll — is damned: unbaptised and so hell-bound. There is always a larger question gnawing away in Robinson’s books, and here it is the one Lila puts to Ames when they first talk: “I just been wondering lately why things happen the way they do.” Robinson spends the rest of the book trying to answer. She doesn’t preach — in Ames she has created the most mild and questioning of believers — but simply shows us Lila’s cautious, partial softening. Slowly, she allows herself to love and be loved.
You don’t need an ounce of faith to be stunned and moved by Lila. God has never been so attractive as he is in Robinson’s depiction, but her heart is with the human experience, in all its forms. Lila and Ames are lonely souls, worn out by sadness and suffering, but they learn how to be together and find salvation, of a sort. Robinson writes Lila in a mystifyingly impressive amalgam of recollection and spontaneously unfolding thought. Sometimes you feel the ideas are being born fresh on the page, and yet they also contain a depth of thinking and feeling that only years of work can summon. Taken together, with Lila as the culmination, these books will surely be read and known in time as one of the great achievements of contemporary literature. An embarrassingly grand statement for such gentle, graceful work.
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
