On Gilead

The Christianity found in Gilead is hardly recognizable from our vantage point in the second quarter of the twenty-first century. It is something different, almost unrecognizable, almost alien. In fact, it is not one Christianity but two, or perhaps even three. While “grace” is a word commonly used in Christian contexts, it appears here somewhat differently.

On its face, this book is a series of writings by an aging Congregationalist minister, John Ames, addressed to his young son. The primary conflict within the text is Ames’s attitude toward his namesake, Jack Boughton (“John Ames” Boughton). We see Ames respond to the world attentively and with care; he has a profound patience for just about everyone around him, with one exception: Jack. Jack is, in fact, the prodigal son. He has made a series of costly errors, and the narrator takes them personally. For instance, Jack had a child out of wedlock and then proceeded to abandon both the child and her mother to abject poverty, leaving his daughter to die prematurely. This is especially painful to John Ames, who lost his own wife and child years (decades?) before, and cannot fathom somebody doing so willingly. The bulk of the book is spent on Ames’s reflections, his attempts to reconcile his own history with the actions of the son of his best friend. And eventually he does so: the prodigal son returns, now with a wife and child who are markedly different. They are Black, in the 1950s, in Missouri (his wife is from Memphis, deep in the Jim Crow South).

The choice to place Jack Boughton’s life in St. Louis is no accident: Marilynne Robinson sets him there as a foil to John Ames’s own history. Ames’s grandfather was a free-soiler, aiding John Brown in his fight (in Kansas) against Missouri in the years leading up to the American Civil War, and the people of Iowa in the text are primarily descended from these free-soilers. While the grandfather’s cause was noble, he too lacked the grace that we see in twenty-first-century evangelical Christianity. This is interesting, because in my view his cause was noble, and just. We might ask, “What did this justice cost, if it made him lose the value of grace?” And yet the question is very difficult to answer ethically: what good is grace when it is an excuse for defending the enslavement of an entire people? Gilead does not answer this question, and it is obvious that Robinson, too, is totally sympathetic toward Ames’s grandfather. Yet Ames’s father is quite different; the excessive zeal of mid-nineteenth-century abolitionism fell through, and what emerged was a moderate, liberal, pacifist twentieth-century Protestantism. But what does the pacifism cost? It is one thing to defend pacifism with regard to conflict between rival imperial powers, as Ames’s father did in the wake of the First World War; it is a wholly different thing to defend a pacifism that quietly looks away from enslavement and genocide. John Ames, our narrator, has a different set of intellectual influences than his father and grandfather: he reads Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Reinhold Niebuhr, men whose theology was fundamentally defined by the Second World War and Germany’s simultaneous genocide of Europe’s Jews. How do we sit with this? Can we at all?

There is also the historical issue, specific to the prairie. Iowa, like Kansas, was settled primarily by free-soilers and abolitionists. Yet by the time the novel takes place in the 1950s, Jack Boughton is unable to discuss his marriage to a Black woman or his mixed-race son out of fear that they will be received badly, and that he will be received badly. The only person he is able to tell is his old minister, John Ames, near the conclusion of the book. This only becomes clear when you read the current conditions, that is, the postwar conditions that count as “contemporary” in the text, alongside John Ames’s historical storytelling. What happened, and why isn’t the United States able to reconcile itself with what it has done to African Americans? How is it that the most racially radical region of the country became a bastion of nearly pietist conservatism? Robinson, as with everything else, leaves the question open.

Robinson’s great achievement, beyond storytelling and character development, is the style and tone of her writing. Through John Ames, she writes short, heavily Anglo-Saxon sentences, reaching for Latinate terms only when absolutely necessary, and it’s a challenge to find a paragraph without serious hedging. Rather than a sign of weakness or uncertainty, I suspect it’s best to read these sentences in terms of epistemological humility. The text, taken together, is deeply reflective, thoughtful, and unlike anything I had ever read before. If I could write like this, I could consider my life, as a whole, a success.

The most interesting passage in the entire book brings together race, meandering reflection, dry humor, and the characteristic personality of the plains; if you have a copy, I encourage you to check out pages 56–60; it’s remarkable and worth reading in its entirety, and unfortunately too long to place here.