Home: A Novel

They are catchy. It was a little slow getting into it. Lila ses the same. It must be her style. But i find I am anxious to get to the end, to get an understanding of the characters. They are intriguing. I was compelled to read Lila because of the introduction to her in Home. I want a completion of these folks before the end of the series.

This is another wonderful book by Marilyn Robinson that I would recommend to anyone who loves fiction that has a message of love and redemption. She is a great writer perhaps one of the best in the nation.

A very powerful story. It's heart-wrenching and you wish things would be better for the protagonists. My only regret is that there was no resolution on the fate of Jack Boughton. Wish Ms. Robinson would come out with a sequel real soon.

The woman is always searching for the precisely communicated emotion. The reader strains to catch up to the precision, located at every paragraph breaking the dialogue, perhaps to our ultimate fatigue. The continuous tenderness of the novel can begin to, if not accepted by the reader, prove boring by the end of the novel. Finally, the prodigal son character seems to be too much of a type to really breathe - assured intellectual hiding behind the tears of a clown. But otherwise quite good.

I enjoyed Home very much but reading it after Gilead, I found it was not quite as good. I would recommend reading both of them for some incredible insight into how our preconceptions and assumptions limit our lives.

Great writing, the language is rich yet simple. This is one of those book that, regardless of who you are, of the fact that it takes place years ago, will mirror some bits of your own experience with life and possibly understand more of it.

This is a beautifully written but uniformly painful novel. For me it was hard to accept the premise that the old preacher who stands at the center of the novel was a loving father, when he was forever blaming his son for his past misdeeds and lack of faith in God. I couldn't really accept that the family was functional except for its black sheep, when all they ever did was ask each other's pardon over every utterance, as though they had hurt the other person's feelings. As a reader, I had to go back and search for the interpretation that would allow me to believe that anyone would take offense at the most inane comments. At first it seemed the novelist's way to point to past troublesome and sensitive situations, but I finally came to feel that the incessant apologies were the speakers' way to signal that they meant to hurt the other person. Too much God in here, not enough charity, in my opinion, which clashes with the constant allusion to Scripture. Still, the characters are interesting, especially, the poor doomed prodigal son, who is, I think, so unforgivingly received.

A story of love and redemption. A beautiful account of a man searching for forgiveness from himself. Moving and timely quotes from scripture. Marilyn Robinson is a wonderful writer of Christian fiction. I could not put this book down.

Great follow-on to Gilead, much the same story but primarily from the perspective of Jack's sister Glory. And then Lila adds some background from another perspective. A great trilogy, with hopefully more to come.

I related each of the characters to my own experience. This book has wonderful character studies and much to say about life and Christ-like love and forgiveness. It's slow moving but every page is worth reading and thinking about.

How Fiction Works
Marilynne Robinson's "Home" is an extraordinary novel, a great novel, in the tradition of Hawthorne and
Melville and Faulkner. It is a very different sort of novel, in fact one critic really just dismissed it, but it could and will stand with the work of these earlier writers. It is a study of those who have remained in or returned to small town America; namely the Boughton family, and to a lesser degree than in the earlier "Gilead" the Ames family. The novel takes place in the summer in Gilead in Iowa where the days unfold in the old Boughton house in a fifties world where church is at the heart of the matter, where one knows what the neighbors are up to, where the coffee comes from the pot on the stove and there are dumplings with the chicken dinner, where there are no blacks on the streets. Jack Boughton returns after a twenty years absence to the house where his sister Glory has come to take care of her father, the "old man," a minister, who has, like many approaching death, a lot he wishes to settle. Here in the old house, a wonderful house with garden, and barn, and great shade trees, and of course their memories of childhood, Jack and Glory and their father manage to get through the days that proceed one after another as though nothing has happened, as though nothing will. And yet the reader cannot rest. Little by little, here and there, secrets are revealed, bits of the past are brought forward, like so many doors opening a crack, then closing. I don't think I have ever read a novel in which so much is said but one feels so few words have been spoken, where so much heartbreak has been recorded in a strange sort of stillness. Robinson writes about familial love, forgiveness, betrayal, guilt, an awful kind of lifelong estrangement, and such loneliness and disappointment. She looks at the wounds, and in an odd way manages to create in the reader a sense of having been wounded too. But then at the very end of the novel Jack gone, his father a day or so from death, we are left with Glory, looking down the road into the dusk, still believing, as do we, that good may come. It is a novel that is totally original, with deep deep roots in the history of American literature.

I read GILEAD some time ago, and recently read LILA. As a result of loving LILA, I completed the trilogy by reading HOME. Of the three, it is my least favorite. There were by far too many examples of Jack's unhappiness and questions about his past before the truth, such as it was, came out for the reader. His great need for acceptance, forgiveness, repentance did not need so many pages of hesitation.

I kept waiting for SOMEONE to give this poor man the gospel. No one ever did. Reverend Boughton had spent so many years grieving and praying for his prodigal son that now that he was home and asking, he would not preach the gospel truth to him. When Jack mentioned his terrible past, the Reverend said, "You're not as bad as you think you are. You were baptized". The gospel truth is that we are far worse than we think. His major concern was that one of his sons was out of the fold. He seemed more concerned with HIS fold than with God's.

For Glory, " Christianity was habit and respect for her parents." She claimed not to know what a soul is. Reverend Ames mostly wanted to keep Jack away from Lila and Robby, and perhaps Jack was using them to get the Reverend's attention. Actually, perhaps Lila could have helped Jack more than any of them. She was struggling with her own past, but she seemed closer to the gospel than they did. There was reason for hope that she would find the gospel for herself; her Reverend husband did not tell her. Frankly, I did not see a Christian in the entire bunch.

In the parable in the Bible, the son was welcomed, loved, and forgiven when he repented and came home. Jack received none of that. I wanted to read a true conversion experience, since there are so few adequately presented in literature. Of course, it is difficult to describe something that can only be felt and experienced. Christian forgiveness and conversion are not facts known, but a soul made new. The Bible calls it new birth.

Perhaps I am missing something in the meaning of this novel. I hope that Iam.

For Glory, "Christianity was habit and respect for her parents." She said she did not know what a soul was.

Once again, Marilynne Robinson has given us a remarkably insightful novel whose characters and spiritual struggles touch those that are part and parcel of our own lives. We leave this reading with a deeper appreciation of all that "home" is to the human heart. What magnificent prose!

Beautifully written book about the important life issues of family, love, loyalty, forgiveness and the effect of religious beliefs on life decisions. Very hard to put down. I look forward to reading the other books in the series.

The writing is exquisite, and the story is one of the most powerful I've read. I expected excellence after reading Gilead, but this novel surpassed my expectations. Once I started, I couldn't stop reading it.