Amazing Grace

Author: Marilynne Robinson

Publishers: Virago

Price: Rs 1,839

Pages: 272 Pages

When Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead came out in 2004, nearly 20 years after her first novel Housekeeping, she was a relatively unknown writer, even in America. Gilead, startlingly different from most contemporary novels, seemed a very unlikely book to receive much attention. Yet it went on to win the Pulitzer in 2005. In 2008 came Home which won the Orange Prize, reinforcing her place as a major American writer. Now, in 2014, comes Lila.

“Triptych” rather than “trilogy” seems to be the right word for the three novels put together, for they are not sequential, but hinged together by the locale — which is Gilead, a fictional small town in Middle Western America, a place where “dogs lie in the middle of the road for the sun” — and connected by the characters and the story.

Religion, theology and the Bible are a constant presence in the novels, not only because the central character, Reverend John Ames, and his friend Reverend Robert Boughton, are ministers of a Church in Gilead, but because of Robinson’s deep involvement with theology and religion. However, she rejects the label of “religious writer” for herself; in fact, she says that anything “written compassionately and perceptively” satisfies the definition of religious. Which would make these novels religious, for there is compassion and perception on every page, in every word of her novels.

Gilead is written in the form of a letter by the 77-year-old Ames  to his seven-year-old son. Diagnosed with a heart condition, knowing that he will not be with his son for long, he is writing to him about “your begats”  – which include Ames’s father and grandfather, reverends both. He writes of the schism between them, the grandfather being an abolitionist who believed that violence is justified in the fight against slavery, whereas his son, John’s father, was a pacifist. Ames’s life is, however, a quiet one, the death of his young wife and newborn child the only momentous events in it. Until the day an unknown woman comes into the church to shelter from the rain, a woman of whom Ames knows nothing, a woman who trusts nobody. Eventually, Ames and the woman marry and a son is born to them. The tone of the letter to his son is one of quiet intimacy, a sharing of Ames’s deepest thoughts, his doubts and beliefs. And totally honest. “I was sick with love,” he tells his son, speaking of the woman who becomes his wife. Above all, the letter is full of tenderness and love for his wife and son; the novel, in fact, glows with  love.

In Home, set in exactly the same period of time, the focus shifts to Ames’s friend, Reverend Boughton, his daughter Glory, and his  reprobate but beloved son, Jack, who has come home after 20 years.  Home is a tragic novel, without the serenity of Gilead; but this too is redolent with love, though contemporary events, like racial problems, are more overtly present in it.

While Gilead was Ames’s narration and Home told from the point of view of Glory, Lila comes through the voice of Lila, an unlettered woman who has lived a hard, almost desperate life. In contrast to Ames who can go way back with his “begats”, Lila has nobody except Doll, the woman who stole her from cruel, uncaring people. “Other people had houses and towns and names and graveyards. They had church pews. All she had was that knife. And dread and loneliness and regret.” The two versions of what led to the marriage of  Lila and Ames  differ slightly. But there is no sense of either discrepancy or untruth in either of them.  In Lila, much more than in Gilead, we see how people, as Robinson says, “are incomprehensible to each other”. Both Lila and Ames make tentative, nervous movements towards each other, both fear that the other will move away. But this is a most remarkable love story between a man of 70 and a woman nearly 40, a man who has preached and lived godliness all his life and a woman who lived with people who stole and killed, a woman who worked for some time in a whorehouse.

One has to admire the  skill with which Robinson tells the story of  the same people, set in roughly the same period, without a single misstep. The same skill also gives us Lila, who despite her lack of language (“I have feelings for which I have no words”)  is able to argue with Ames about theology, her very ignorance making her questions hard to answer. Why do things happen the way they do? she asks him and he cannot find an answer. She is troubled about the people she lived with, Doll and a group of itinerant people looking for work. Are they lost, she asks, because they don’t know the Bible, they never went to Church? Lila’s coarse language is always redeemed by its directness and honesty and almost comes close to Ames’s language, which is one of Biblical simplicity.

There are many remarkable things about Robinson’s fiction. The quality of timelessness about her novels,  for one. Though set in the time of the Civil Rights movement, they seem to belong to any time, to all time. There is also the remarkable way the three novels are intertwined together. Robinson considers it surprising, though gratifying,  that her books, about the lives and thoughts of old men in a small town  who are constantly quoting the Bible and discussing things like transgression, predestination, salvation and perdition, have found so many readers  — even in China! But Robinson’s Christianity is not a narrow, aggressive or self-righteous one, it is more of a moral vision. There is also the austere simplicity of her language, her unforgettable characters and, above all, her startling originality, whether in ideas or in expression. When she says that “narratives  define whole civilisations to themselves, for weal or woe,” one is inclined to cry “Hallelujah”, for the concept, as well as for the language.

With only four novels, Robinson has earned a formidable  reputation: she is called the greatest living American novelist and  her novels regarded as classics, Gilead in particular having achieved a mythic status. American literature has always been searching for the Great American Novel, with almost all the contenders, from Mark Twain to Jonathan Franzen, being men. But Robinson’s work belongs to  an entirely different tradition of American writing, which includes Emerson, Thoreau, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson — individualistic writing which celebrates the individual human experience. Ames speaks of the “singularity, the courage, the loneliness of a human face”. “This is an interesting planet,” he tells his son. “It needs all the attention you can give it.” This could almost be Robinson speaking. To a reader, her novels reveal a  new world, opening  our jaded eyes to the wonder, the miracle of it.

Is it presumptuous for one who knows little of the different sects of the Church in America and  has only a fleeting acquaintanceship with the Bible to write about Robinson’s novels? Perhaps. Yet it is possible to try and communicate the joy one has had in reading these novels, which come as a breath of fresh air in a literary world of hyped mediocre books. When she says, “we should regard our humanity as a privilege”, when she says, “Being and human beings are invested with a degree of value we can’t honor appropriately”, an idea that all our bhakti poets sang of, there is no longer  anything alien about Robinson.

The writer is a novelist, whose most recent book is Shadow Play