I'm uncertain about what led me to read Marilynne Robinson's 'Gilead', a book titled after the Midwestern town of Gilead, where the story takes place. One of the reasons why I persevered in reading this book was a curiosity about the historical Protestant Christian underpinnings of American society. While that was my initial draw, I also grew captivated by the vivid character portraits Robinson crafts across these four linked novels. There is nothing that could be considered a worthy plot line that runs through or across these novels other than Jack's doomed love affair with a colored woman, if at all it could be deemed as such. That effectively makes these novels a vivid sketch of characters through the passage of time along with their ruminations which are often theologically Christian in nature.

    Although the storyline of Marilynne Robinson's first novel 'Gilead' centers on Reverend John Ames and his family history, it also offers a glimpse into the lives of other characters who later star in their own novels. These would include Reverend Robert Boughton and his tangled and complicated son Jack and Lila an orphaned girl who has lived most of her life as a vagabond before eventually marrying the elderly Reverend Ames and settling into a life of uncertain domesticity.  These novels were written and published over a 16 year long period. I read through all the four novels, and my first advice to readers would be that it can often feel cumbersome reading them, especially the latter two novels 'Lila' and 'Jack'. A possible cause for this cumbersomeness could be attributed to a tendentious repetition that stems from Mrs. Robinson's desire to finetune the description of the inner world of her characters. But this tendentiousness is maybe to an extent balanced by the wonderfully poignant passages that are strewn across these novels as well as the brilliant rendering of some of the characters who inhabit these pages.

    The first novel 'Gilead' is written in the form of a long letter by Ames addressed to his son. Ames is by now very old (78 years to be exact) and has a serious heart condition with a very bad prognosis that has him staring at his own mortality. It is an profound yearning for a future he will never share with his young wife and son —that compels him to pour his soul into this letter; a hope that his son would share in his life through this letter. The letter mirroring his wandering thoughts flit from one emotion to another. He muses on every thing, his past, his family's past, the profound but also often on  things very commonplace. Two youngsters laughing over some shared remarks as they pass by his parsonage makes him wonder on the nature of laughter 'It is an amazing thing to watch people laugh, the way it sort of takes them over. Sometimes they really do struggle with it'. A few paragraphs later, he reflects on a more profound theme: the nature of his relationship with his father. 'You can know a thing to death and still be, for all purposes, completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father or his son, yet there might still be nothing between them but loyalty, love, and mutual incomprehension'.

    Woven into these reflections is the story of Gilead, Iowa, a town deeply entwined with his family’s history and identity. Founded by 'Free Soilers', a group driven by fervent abolitionist convictions, the town of Gilead was established as a vital stronghold for abolitionist fighters and a key hub for smuggling fugitive slaves northward to freedom. Just like his father and his grandfather before him, Ames  followed the family vocation of preaching; a choice not forced upon him but, as he described, something that felt like second nature. To read 'Gilead' is to be fascinated with this 'second nature' or 'mind' of John Ames. This 'religious mind'  is all the more exceptional since it is an era where skepticism has become almost casual in higher theological circles. It touches even Ames own family, where Edward his prodigious older brother chosen for the mantle of ministry rejects it all and declares himself an atheist. The much older Ames reflecting on his unwavering faith would observe in his letter "While I was at seminary I read every book he (Edward) had ever mentioned and every book I thought he might have read" but it never made any impression on me.
    The past as Ames reminisces in this letter is a medley of many events, sermons preached, lives lived, theological speculations that blend into one another, but some landmark moments stand out too. The idiosyncratic grandfather of Ames who had been staying with them in his retirement leaves for Kansas after a huff with Ames father. When news of his death reaches them, Ames and his father leave to find his grave. After walking many days through a desolate land which had been abandoned by it's inhabitants because of drought, they arrive famished to a graveyard overgrown with brushes. After a long day of clearing the weeds and overgrowth, his father stands beside his grandfather's grave to pray. This scene would be a sample of the powerful evocative descriptions that are sprinkled throughout this book. "We stood there together with our miserable clothes all damp and our hands all dirty from the work, and the first crickets rasping and the flies really beginning to bother and the birds crying out the way they do when they’re about ready to settle for the night, and my father bowed his head and began to pray, remembering his father to the Lord, and also asking the Lord’s pardon, and his father’s as well. I tried to keep my eyes closed, but after a while I had to look around a little. And this is something I remember very well. At first I thought I saw the sun setting in the east; I knew where east was, because the sun was just over the horizon when we got there that morning. Then I realized that what I saw was a full moon rising just as the sun was going down. Each of them was standing on its edge, with the most wonderful light between them. It seemed as if you could touch it, as if there were palpable currents of light passing back and forth, or as if there were great taut skeins of light suspended between them. I wanted my father to see it, but I knew I’d have to startle him out of his prayer, and I wanted to do it the best way, so I took his hand and kissed it. And then I said, ‘Look at the moon.’ And he did. We just stood there until the sun was down and the moon was up. They seemed to float on the horizon for quite a long time, I suppose because they were both so bright you couldn’t get a clear look at them. And that grave, and my father and I, were exactly between them. My father finally said, ‘I would never have thought this place could be beautiful. I’m glad to know that.’".

    Another recalled moment breaking through with searing vividness and intensity for Ames  is the day when the Baptist church in Gilead burns down. Lightning had stuck the steeple and the steeple had fallen into the building. The people of the town had gathered to put down the fire and redeem whatever not burnt down. As a warm rain descends on the place, and amidst the singing of "Blessed Jesus" and  "The Old Rugged Cross" they collect the ruined Bibles and hymnals to bury them in their separate graves. In this hazy day when the soot from the burning church covers all of them with ashes, Ames father gives him a biscuit which has soot from his arms. " Never mind " he says "there's nothing cleaner than ash". An older Ames recalling this event of his childhood offers a glimpse of the particular style of Marilynne Robinson's writing as well as a portrait of Ames."When I’m up here in my study with the radio on and some old book in my hands and it’s night-time and the wind blows and the house creaks, I forget where I am, and it’s as though I’m back in hard times for a minute or two, and there’s a sweetness in the experience which I don’t understand. My point here is that you never do know the actual nature even of your own experience.But that only enhances the value of it. Or perhaps it has no fixed and certain nature. I remember my father down on his heels in the rain, water dripping from his hat, feeding me biscuit from his scorched hand, with that old blackened wreck of a church behind him and steam rising where the rain fell on embers, the rain falling in gusts and the women singing ‘The Old Rugged Cross’ while they saw to things, moving so gently, as if they were dancing to the hymn, almost. It was so joyful and sad. I mention it again because it seems to me much of my life was comprehended in that moment. Grief itself has often returned me to that morning, when I took communion from my father’s hand. I remember it as communion, and I believe that’s what it was."

    Ames almost mystic ability of being able to infuse ordinary things and particular moments with sacredness and profundity amazes us readers. It mystifies Ames too. But the letter is not about profoundness alone, there are also descriptions of tender intimacy. "Just now I was listening to a song on the radio, standing there swaying to it a little, I guess, because your mother saw me from the hallway and she said, ‘I could show you how to do that.’ She came and put her arms around me and put her head on my shoulder, and after a while she said, in the gentlest voice you could ever imagine, ‘Why’d you have to be so damn old?’ I ask myself the same question".

    Ames concludes the letter with a tone akin to a prayer. There is a mixture of longing, an anxiety for the future of his young family left with no livelihood after him and a sense of wonderment at existence itself, "There are a thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient".