Marilynne Robinson's Home

The snow is still here, dirty and piled on the sides of the road. Lawn chairs and ironing boards stake out parking spaces. Neighborly shoveling and snowbound parties have turned into shouting matches and threats. Driving to work is an obstacle course of potholes and lanes that end in snow mounds. The one good thing about the longer commute is that I have more time to listen to a recording of Marilynne Robinson’s Home.

My feelings on Robinson’s third novel are mixed. (I should note that I have not read Gilead, to which Home is a companion.) When I first started listening to Home, I worried that not enough was happening in the present action to keep my attention, especially because I was listening to it rather than reading it. However, the Virginia Woolf–like meditations on place and people soon drew me in, and the novel took shape as an intense interaction between a brother and sister who haven’t seen each other in twenty years. The relationships among the characters, who include an ailing father, give momentum to the book's thoughtful and deliberative telling. And while the tension and emotional awkwardness sometimes make the story painful to listen to, they demonstrate Robinson’s skill in storytelling.

Now that I am closer to the end of the book, though, I am feeling a little tired, not of the characters’ pain so much as the many scenes of the father’s sermon-like opining on his son’s twenty-year abandonment. Perhaps part of my irritation is that the reader of the recording attempts to imitate an elderly man’s voice that is extremely grating and strained. The father, the Rev. Boughton, has too much to say to always be heard in such a voice. We’ve also heard his emotionally painful introspection several times. These lectures finally build to a crucial scene that explains more and pushes the story past the bounds in which it has so far remained. The scene is a relief for the reader—before this moment, so much is still unsaid and unexplained.

Home’s brilliance is Robinson’s portrayal of the characters. They are complicated in their sins and good intentions, and while I don’t always like them, I do care what happens to them. In both Housekeeping (her first novel) and Home, Robinson reveals her characters layer by layer so that by the end of each book, the reader realizes that one of the main characters is much further from mental stability than it at first seems. The recognition is kind of horrifying. In the case of Home, we get Jack, a well-read, clever, and intelligent middle-aged man who has struggled with alcoholism and keeping a job. We know he has stayed away from his family for two decades, but the true fragility of his mental state does not emerge until later in the novel. More and more he seems to be living in a reality suited to an angst-riddled teenager. Both novels turn out to be portraying characters for whom homelessness is home; Robinson depicts an almost imperceptible line between stability and instability, between having a home and surviving as a drifter. For Jack, alcoholism is merely a symptom of a seemingly innate sadness and loneliness his father says he has displayed from birth. It is also connected to past events, but the novel seems to be saying that Jack’s lack of place, his separateness, his rejection of his family’s help and love, is inevitable.

I am nearing the end of Home and waiting to see how this sense of inevitability plays out. It’s been a few years since I read Housekeeping, but I remember feeling as if it contained a kind of magical realism. By the end of that story, the realization of homelessness seems almost surreal, and I wondered if I’d read the book completely wrong. Home feels more grounded and because of this, is more emotionally affecting.

—C.