Another masterpiece by Robinson

Marilynne Robinson, whose previous novels include Housekeeping (1980), Gilead (2004), which won the Pulitzer Prize, and Home (2008), is a master of creating a character and giving that character a unique narrative voice.

In Lila (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014, $26, 272 pages) the titular character is taken from an abusive home as a young child by a woman who calls herself Doll. Robinson’s language captures the child’s age and environment: “Her arms were all over scratches.” “The people inside fought themselves quiet.”

Robinson never offers dates, but it’s probably around 1920. Doll raises Lila with the help of another woman. Then, when Lila is a teen or older, they join a group moving from place to place, looking for work and food. She captures the feel and detail of the 1930s Depression without giving dates or other historical information.

The narrative moves back and forth, always from Lila’s perspective, though written in third person, between her experience with this group, led by the mercurial Doane, and her coming to the town of Gilead, Iowa, the setting for Robinson’s two previous novels.

She arrives after having been abandoned by the group and Doll being arrested for murder. Soon she meets Reverend John Ames, who is the narrative voice of “Gilead.”

When they first meet, she says, “I just been wondering lately why things happen the way they do.” This sparks a connection. He says, “I’ve been wondering about that more or less my whole life.”

This exploration of the meaning of things runs through all of Robinson’s fiction (she is perhaps our most theological of literary artists), yet she is less interested in answers than in the exploration of them. Ames says that “life is a very deep mystery, and that finally the grace of God is all that can resolve it. And the grace of God is also a very deep mystery.”

He has been a minister for many years and is well-respected in town. He lost his wife and newborn son forty years earlier and has remained unmarried. Yet this young woman throws him for a loop.

She is not that impressed by his religious talk. For her, “the best thing about church was that when she sat in the last pew there was no one looking at her.”

She carries with her a lifetime of living hand-to-mouth, often outside. She connects with nature, and even after she is living with Ames, she gets up in the morning and walks to the river to bathe.

She also carries with her the presence of Doll and often thinks back to the time Doll rescued her. She wants “to feel trust rise up in her like that sweet old surprise of being carried off in strong arms, wrapped in a gentleness worn all soft and perfect.”

One day, when Ames tells Lila he should repay her for taking roses to the grave of his wife and child, she hears herself say, “You ought to marry me.”

Given her hard life, she has developed a hard exterior and has a difficult time trusting anyone, so her statement surprises even her. And then he agrees.

One of the strong images in the novel is water. Lila likes to spend time at the river, and soon after they agree to marry, she asks Ames to baptize her.

Afterward, they talk. She captures the turmoil of her life when she says to him, “I don’t trust nobody. I can’t stay nowhere. I can’t get a minute of rest.”

Throughout the book, Lila struggles with believing she can be accepted for who she is. Despite Ames’ acceptance and love for her, she keeps longing for Doll. “She lived for Doll to see.”

A major theme of the novel is how sorrow and joy, loneliness and connection come together, and people move between them, as in a dance.

Given her long experience of loneliness, Lila has trouble accepting love. “When you’re scalded, touch hurts, it makes no difference if it’s kindly meant.” Yet after her baptism, Ames puts his hand on her hair. “That was what made her cry. Just the touch of his hand.”

Everyone experiences loneliness. Even the wind, “clapping shut and prying open everything that was meant to keep it out, bothering where it could, tired of its huge loneliness.”

In Lila we get to know a person who has grown up in poverty. She is made strong through her survival skills yet wounded by her experiences of rejection and is looking for some connection, even while hesitating to grasp it when it comes.

In this novel we come to know a unique character who draws out of us our own feelings of rejection and our longings for connection. Lila is yet another masterpiece from Marilynne Robinson.

A troubled genius

Last Sunday, the Wichita Eagle published my review of Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story by D.T. Max (Viking, 2012, $27.95, 356 pages). I hesitate to place it here, but I do for a couple of reasons. First, some of you may be, as I say in the first paragraph of my review, "serious readers of contemporary American fiction." Second, as I mention in the last paragraph, Wallace struggled to find "some truth behind the banalities of daily life." While Wallace was particularly religious, though he did delve into Buddhism and Catholicism, his struggle is similar to a spirituality in the present tense, i.e., seeking to live in each moment with an awareness of God's presence. Wallace, at least, strove for awareness, which is a worthy struggle. Anyway, here's the review:

Serious readers of contemporary American fiction at least know about David Foster Wallace, a wunderkind whose massive novel “Infinite Jest” had a great effect on literature. Now, just four years after his death from suicide at age 46, we have the first biography of this remarkable writer.

D.T. Max, a New Yorker writer who worked with the cooperation of Wallace’s family and friends, distills a large amount of research, including access to Wallace’s notes and many of his letters. Max also displays his careful reading of the writer’s published works, including his three novels, three short story collections and many nonfiction essays.

Wallace grew up in Champaign-Urbana, Ill., then went to Amherst, where he excelled in his studies, focusing on philosophy and literature, winning many academic awards. He also struggled with depression and had to leave school at times.

During one stay at the psychiatric unit of a hospital, “the doctors likely considered the possibility that he suffered from bipolar disorder, manic depression.” But they ended up putting him on Nardil, which instead treats atypical depression. He would stay on this drug until a year before he died.

A recognized genius (he received a MacArthur grant), Wallace incorporated huge amounts of information and created new approaches to storytelling. His head teemed with thoughts too numerous to communicate. For an epigraph to the book, Max uses a quote from Wallace’s story “Good Old Neon”: “What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.”

We learn how much of Wallace’s own experience he used in his fiction. In a footnote, Max quotes Wallace’s sister, Amy: “We [the Wallace family] quietly agreed that his nonfiction was fanciful and his fiction was what you had to look out for.”

Max traces Wallace’s writing from his first book, “The Broom of the System,” written as his senior thesis at Amherst and widely acclaimed, to his last, the posthumous “The Pale King,” which he left unfinished at his death. He shows how Wallace changed through the years, growing from “Broom,” a postmodern novel heavily influenced by Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, through his first story collection, “The Girl with Curious Hair,” which critiques such metafictionists as John Barth, to “Infinite Jest,” which marked a major change from using irony to pointing toward a more positive outcome.

Partly through his own experience of addiction, Wallace had come to see America as “a nation of addicts, unable to see that what looked like love freely given was really need neurotically and chronically unsatisfied.” However, rather than simply describe that addiction, Wallace said in an interview, the writer’s job was to give “CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness.” Wallace noted that “American writers were still content to describe an ironic culture when they should be showing the way out.”

Max, who gives much attention to Wallace’s best-known work, writes, “In ‘Infinite Jest,’ Wallace was proposing to wash Pynchonian excess in the chilling waters of DeLillo’s prose and then heat it up again in Dostoevsky’s redemptive fire.” He goes on: “The book is at once a meditation on the pain of adolescence, the pleasures of intoxication, the perils of addiction, the price of isolation, and the precariousness of sanity.”

With the publication of that book in 1996, Wallace became a celebrity, and the attention was excruciating to one who so resisted crowds and prized his privacy. By then he had taken a job at Illinois State University that allowed him to teach part-time and write the rest of the time.

After nearly a decade there, he accepted an invitation from Pomona College in California, to write and teach one course per semester. There, following many failed relationships with women, he met Karen Green, an artist, whom he later married.

Meanwhile, he published two collections of short stories, “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” and “Oblivion,” plus numerous nonfiction pieces, many collected in two books, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” and “Consider the Lobster.”

But he agonized to make progress on “The Pale King,” the novel he was writing about the IRS. Always a perfectionist, he felt stuck trying to figure out the right approach to the work.

At the same time, he was happy with Green and decided to go off Nardil in 2007. Doctors tried different combinations of antidepressants and even electroconvulsive therapy, but on Sept. 12, 2008, Wallace hung himself at home.

Max has charted not only the life of this extraordinary writer but his influence on literature. One of his more influential works actually came from a graduation address Wallace gave at Kenyon College in 2005. In a speech against egoism and egotism, he encouraged students to practice awareness, to open themselves, even in line at the supermarket, “to a moment of the most supernal beauty—‘on fire with the same force that lit the stars—compassion, love, the subsurface unity of all things.’ ”

Someone taped the speech and wrote it out online. It went viral and later was published in a short book. The speech summed up, in a way, the arc of Wallace’s writing, seeking some truth behind the banalities of daily life. And his honest struggle seemed to resonate with many readers. It still does.

Forgiveness in strange places

Good fiction often takes us into worlds completely foreign to us and makes them familiar. It even creates characters we may on first sight think we have nothing in common with and makes them feel human, sympathetic.

 

Hanna Pylväinen’s debut novel is one such work. The subject of We Sinners is a family, two parents and nine children. The Rovaniemis belong to a conservative church—a Lutheran revival movement called Laestadianism—in modern-day Michigan. The church forbids dancing, drinking, TV and other common practices in our culture. But its central belief, repeated several times in the novel, is that believers are forgiven in Jesus’ blood when they repent.

Pylväinen tells the story from the point of view of the various members of the family. We witness the struggle of each person with other family members and with their faith. Some hold onto the faith; others reject it; some fall somewhere in between.

Pylväinen uses telling details to show these struggles. For example, Warren, the father, reflects on the family’s constant struggle with poverty: “It was daily things, it was money, it was when he stopped at a gas station and the kids all chanted, ‘Get a treat, get a treat,’ and when he came out with chips they grabbed for them like starving people.”

Tiina, the second oldest child, is the first in the family to leave the faith, yet “she felt no thrills of liberation.” Her becoming an unbeliever is like a conversion, yet she can’t quite fill the emptiness. After she cheats on her boyfriend, she feels “she was no good in both the church’s world and in the world she had chosen.” For her, “it wasn’t about the sinning at all, it was what you did about the sinning, and she had no means of forgiveness about her.”

In spite of how oppressive the church feels to many of the children, it’s difficult to leave it behind. When Julia, the fourth youngest, who has left, returns for a visit, she sleeps in a bed with her younger sister and experiences “the old childhood security of many people asleep in one place, the uncomplicated comfort of someone in her bed who was not her lover.”

Not everyone leaves. Brita, the oldest, marries a man in the church and has numerous children (four and counting). Nels, the oldest boy, goes to college and takes up drinking and going to parties in pursuit of Bernie, a girl outside the faith. But no matter how often he breaks the rules, forgiveness is available at church, and eventually he marries a girl in the church and settles down.

Pylväinen uses irony in this interplay of belief and unbelief. Nels’ roommate, Clayton, is his conscience as Nels breaks the rules. But later, Clayton takes up drinking and ends up with Bernie.

Uppu, the youngest, befriends a new student, Jonas Chan, a shy Asian-American, at her high school. Jonas goes to her church out of courtesy and discovers a faith different from the one his parents had left. “Unlike his family’s old church, no one said they loved Jesus, no one was overemotional, and God was less a personal friend than someone spoken of quietly, as if in fear of disturbing Him.” As Jonas becomes more and more interested in the church and then becomes a believer, Uppu can’t stand it and leaves.

The final chapter goes back to 1847, to Finland, where we encounter Laestadius, the founder of the church. What became in many ways a group that imprisons people in its conservative, sometimes harsh ways began as a revival that liberated people from some harsh cultural practices that were particularly oppressive to women.

In We Sinners, Pylväinen deftly explores this dance between between oppression and liberation, between belief and unbelief, and shows the gray areas. These are not polarities but gradations of human experience. We all move in and out of various communities and belief systems, searching for love and acceptance. Often we search for forgiveness. This novel shows that sometimes it’s found in strange places.