Book Review: Home by Marilynne Robinson

This may as well serve as a double review; Home is the sequel to Gilead and so the setting, a fictional small town in Iowa, Gilead, and the principal characters remain the same.

In Home, the outlier of family, Jack Boughton, returns to live with his aging father, the retired church pastor, Reverend Robert Boughton, and his younger sister, Gloria.

Whereas Gilead’s narrator is Reverend John Ames, a lifelong friend of Reverend Boughton, and revolves around a series of letters written to his godson, Jack Boughton, Home is written in the third person and the action takes place almost entirely within the four walls of the Boughton’s house.

In some ways, this is a re-telling of the parable of the prodigal son. Like Gilead, Home is steeped in scripture and faith-related issues. Jack as a wayward youth, often in trouble with the law, now returns, his battles with alcohol unresolved, as is his family life, and faith. Will he, like the prodigal of Luke’s gospel ‘come to his senses’ and return home in a deeper way than merely geographically?

But the impact of Home for me was one of extraordinary attention to the minute detail of moods, tensions, fear of precedents, hope and disappointments, and moral dilemmas that the author, Marilynne Robinson brings to bear in Home page after page.

It’s a slow burn. Its major emotion is sadness

There are no chapter divisions – it is one long dive into the tension between old Reverend Boughton and his son Jack as they co-exist with Gloria, under one roof. In one sense they are deeply united and tender with each other, and yet there is a constant struggle to close the gap between father and son.

It’s a slow burn. Its major emotion is sadness.

So, why read Home? Why not read a good detective novel where, even if the detective is gravely flawed, you know the crime will be solved? Or a spy novel full of action and courage? Home is a blues novel, left, largely, on persistently unresolved blues notes. It does contain courage but its examination of brokenness includes failure as well as degrees of success.

So, why read it? Because it is brilliantly written.