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 place called home

Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison is one our greatest living writers. Her novels combine lyrical prose with haunting stories of African-American life in different historical periods. She reveals both the horrors and the joys people experience at the frayed edges of life and death.

Home, her 10^th novel, is short, really a novella. Its use of symbols make it seem almost an allegory as it explores the meaning of “home.” Yet it retains the bite of realism with its detail about life for blacks in 1950s America.

Frank Money is a veteran of the Korean War suffering from what today we call post-traumatic stress disorder, “the free-floating rage, the self-loathing disguised as somebody else’s fault.” He has frequent flashbacks of the deaths of two army buddies from his hometown of Lotus, Georgia. The book opens with Frank in a psych hospital after being arrested by police. He escapes and stops at AME Zion Church, where Reverend Locke takes him in and helps him on his way to Chicago through a series of contacts, like the Underground Railroad.

Money, Lotus, Zion, Locke all carry multiple meanings and tell us to look beneath the surface of the story as it explores the meaning of home. That word often carries a cozy, safe resonance for people, but for Frank, Lotus was not such a place. His family moved there after being forced under threat of death by men “both hooded and not” to leave their home in Texas on foot, along with 14 other families. In Lotus, “the worst place in the world, worse than any battlefield,” Frank tries to protect his younger sister Cee from their mean grandmother, while their parents work themselves to death.

Now Frank is back in his homeland, America, where he faces racist attacks and must be on constant alert, much like on the battlefields of Korea. He receives a letter telling him Cee is in trouble. “Come fast. She be dead if you tarry,” it says.

Morrison intersperses her chapters, which offer not only Frank’s but Cee’s and even the grandmother’s points of view, with short asides, almost like hallucinations, of Frank addressing the omniscient author.

We learn that Cee, who fled Lotus at 14 with a man who married her, then left her in Atlanta, survives, moving from job to job. She ends up working for a wealthy white doctor who does experiments related to eugenics. His experiments on Cee’s womb leave her near death, and the house’s black housekeeper writes Frank.

He arrives and takes Cee back to Lotus. Though filled with dramatic tension, the story has the feel of a Greek myth. In Lotus, a place of lethargy (a la the lotus eaters in Homer), he takes her to a woman known for healing. She takes in Cee and calls on other women in the community to help. They use natural remedies to help her body and their wisdom to heal her spirit.

Morrison is a master of capturing a community’s folk wisdom (see her early novel Sula). She writes: “The women handled sickness as though it were an affront, an illegal, invading braggart who needed whipping.” The women tell Cee, whose grandmother treated her like dirt: “You good enough for Jesus. That’s all you need to know.”

These women practice what their mothers taught them “during that period that rich people called the Depression and they called life.” They’ve learned that “mourning was helpful but God was better and they did not want to meet their Maker and have to explain a wasteful life.”

Cee returns to Frank, who takes her to a place where as a child he had seen horses. Later, a horrible incident took place there, one that parallels an experience of his from Korea. Up to now, the novel has sometimes bordered on cliché, and parts have felt didactic, but at the end, Morrison draws together her themes with some powerful images that bring some redemption to the meaning of home, which up to then had been anything but safe or peaceful for Frank and Cee.

And this story set long ago resonates in powerful ways with readers in a different era and helps us all explore what can make our homeland a true home.