“Lila: A Novel” by Marilynne Robinson; Farrar, Straus and Giroux (262 pages, $26)
Over the last decade, Marilynne Robinson has been at work on a project that is more than a little Faulknerian: a series of novels, taking place in 1950s Iowa and revolving around a narrow set of characters, that seeks to use narrative as a tool for meditation, for an apprehension of the world.
Her 2004 novel “Gilead,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, takes the form of a communique from a Protestant pastor named John Ames to his young son; “Home” (2008) turns to Ames’ lifelong friend the Rev. Robert Boughton and his relationship with a different sort of (prodigal) son. To call one the sequel of the other is to miss the point of what Robinson is doing, which is not so much to evoke experience sequentially as concurrently, and in so doing, to trace the incomprehensible largeness of even the most constrained lives.
Such a perspective also marks her new novel “Lila,” which returns to Pastor Ames and his wife, Lila, a much younger woman who is also something of a prodigal.
It’s gorgeous writing, an absolutely beautiful book, which is the first thing to note about “Lila.” This should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Robinson, a novelist who can make the most quotidian moments epic because of her ability to peel back the surfaces of ordinary lives.
The book begins by looking backward: to Lila’s rescue (or theft) from a family that neglects her and her subsequent Dust Bowl era meandering with a loose tribe of drifters, who together form the outline of a family.
The basic action of the novel is simple: Lila, newly married and pregnant with Ames’ baby, has to decide whether she will stay or go. It’s a harder decision than we might think, for she has never been a stayer; she is wary as a skittish colt.
“I just don’t go around trusting people. Don’t see the need,” she says to Ames, right before she tells him, “You ought to marry me” — a moment that deftly captures the conflict at the center of both character and novel.
At heart, of course, this is a spiritual conundrum — not to mention a central aspect of her husband’s faith. That Lila does not quite share it is one of the novel’s many victories, allowing Robinson to explore belief and its related questions with openness and grace.
Throughout the book, Ames argues with his old friend Boughton, who takes a hard line on salvation and the soul. Ames, on the other hand, is gentler, unwilling to see spirit outside the filter of daily life. “It’s all a prayer,” he says, late in the novel. “Family is a prayer. Wife is a prayer. Marriage is a prayer.” But when Lila suggests that baptism too is a prayer, Ames takes issue; “No,” he insists. “Baptism is what I’d call a fact.”
The distinction is important, signaling the tension between faith as sensibility and faith as doctrine, which is emblematic of Robinson’s intentions for the book.
For Robinson, the point is reconciliation, which has long been one of her essential themes. Who are we and how did we get here? What does any of this mean?
By David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times
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