GILEAD

GILEAD
Marilynn Robinson
Holtzbrinck/FSG

I immediately fell in love with the wise and generous voice of the narrator of Gilead and with this novel of family, generational conflict, and religious faith. Gilead is an epistolary novel, a long letter written in the 1950s by an older man, a Congregationalist minister on the brink of death, to his young son. He recounts the relationship between his grandfather, a pistol carrying abolitionist minister who ran with John Brown in Kansas, and his father, a minister with pacifist convictions. He goes on to describe his late marriage and his long career as a minister in Gilead, a small community in Iowa. Marilynne Robinson has transformed this “ordinary” life (and I’m sure she would argue there is no such thing, that all life is extraordinary) into something that will pierce your heart. There are so many fine moments in this book that will remind the reader of the beauty and strangeness at the center of our own lives, of how miraculous life is. This is the best novel I’ve read in a long time.