52 Books in 52 Weeks, it's called. The challenge is simple: read a book every week for a year.
68. Home.
I was tempted to think of this as an addendum to Gilead, Robinson’s 2004 Pulitzer Prizewinner about Rev. Ames and his relationship to his spiritual son, the prodigal Jack Boughton. But this side of reading it, I realize that the story of Jack Boughton needed more than just that single accounting of grace. Gilead details Ames’s struggle to forgive Jack; Home looks at the same story from the point of view of the Boughton household, and the myriad other forgivenesses that Jack demands and engenders, or fails to.
The central mystery of Gilead — that Jack had married a colored woman — is of necessity known to the reader this time, and so we have more time to reflect on Jack’s own image of himself. Robinson has created an almost pathologically tortured soul: an alcoholic and a thief, lonely to the point of pain with a loneliness almost entirely self-inflicted. Away 20 years, he returns suddenly to Robert Boughton’s home, as his father is in his twilight years. Rev. Boughton is cared for by his youngest daughter, Glory, now in her 40’s and in her own way a failure at life, too. All three of them struggle mightily to approximate a loving, trusting family, but Jack’s nature and their long history make it impossible. Jack’s youthful indiscretion (he fathered a child by a near-child herself, and abandoned both; the child eventually died in poverty) was central to his family’s grief, and he himself is burdened by unspeakable regret.
The title brings to mind any number of old saws: “home is where when you have to go there, they have to take you in,” “you can’t go home again,” etc., (and both apply here). Jack tries desperately to belong in his father’s house, and ultimately fails, following an act of desperation. Robinson leaves open the possibility that Jack (and by extension, we) may, in the end, have no reasonable place to rest:
“That odd capacity for destitution, as if by nature we ought to have so much more than nature gives us. As if we are shockingly unclothed when we lack the complacencies of ordinary life. In destitution, even of feeling or purpose, a human being is more hauntingly human and vulnerable to kindnesses because there is the sense that things should be otherwise, and then the thought of what is wanting and what alleviation would be, and how the sould could be put at ease, restored. At home. But the soul finds its own home if it ever has a home at all.” (p. 282)
The heart-rending coda, which I won’t spoil, sees a kind of redemption of his efforts through the imaginings of his sister. It is one in a string of attempts at defining forgiveness in the novel: as a kindly lie, as action even in absence of belief, as resignation, as false hope. The central fact of the novel is disappointed hope, and yet every character wrestles his or her existence to wring redemption out. The stillness and sadness that sets over the novel is almost itself a character.
It’s a high achievement, to tell the same story twice and to twice create a singular thing of beauty. I can only look forward to Robinson’s next effort. Surely whatever she sets her mind to will be worth reading.
