Home: A Novel
by Marilynne Robinson
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Book Summary Information
Author: Marilynne RobinsonEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-09-02
ISBN: 0374299102
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Book Reviews of Home: A Novel
Book Review: A Great American Novel
Summary: 5 Stars
How Fiction Works
Marilynne Robinson's "Home" is an extraordinary novel, a great novel, in the tradition of Hawthorne and
Melville and Faulkner. It is a very different sort of novel, in fact one critic really just dismissed it, but it could and will stand with the work of these earlier writers. It is a study of those who have remained in or returned to small town America; namely the Boughton family, and to a lesser degree than in the earlier "Gilead" the Ames family. The novel takes place in the summer in Gilead in Iowa where the days unfold in the old Boughton house in a fifties world where church is at the heart of the matter, where one knows what the neighbors are up to, where the coffee comes from the pot on the stove and there are dumplings with the chicken dinner, where there are no blacks on the streets. Jack Boughton returns after a twenty years absence to the house where his sister Glory has come to take care of her father, the "old man," a minister, who has, like many approaching death, a lot he wishes to settle. Here in the old house, a wonderful house with garden, and barn, and great shade trees, and of course their memories of childhood, Jack and Glory and their father manage to get through the days that proceed one after another as though nothing has happened, as though nothing will. And yet the reader cannot rest. Little by little, here and there, secrets are revealed, bits of the past are brought forward, like so many doors opening a crack, then closing. I don't think I have ever read a novel in which so much is said but one feels so few words have been spoken, where so much heartbreak has been recorded in a strange sort of stillness. Robinson writes about familial love, forgiveness, betrayal, guilt, an awful kind of lifelong estrangement, and such loneliness and disappointment. She looks at the wounds, and in an odd way manages to create in the reader a sense of having been wounded too. But then at the very end of the novel Jack gone, his father a day or so from death, we are left with Glory, looking down the road into the dusk, still believing, as do we, that good may come. It is a novel that is totally original, with deep deep roots in the history of American literature.
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