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Summary
Summary
The New York Times Bestseller
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
National Book Award Finalist
A new American classic from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gilead and Housekeeping
Marilynne Robinson, one of the greatest novelists of our time, returns to the town of Gilead in an unforgettable story of a girlhood lived on the fringes of society in fear, awe, and wonder.
Lila, homeless and alone after years of roaming the countryside, steps inside a small-town Iowa church-the only available shelter from the rain-and ignites a romance and a debate that will reshape her life. She becomes the wife of a minister, John Ames, and begins a new existence while trying to make sense of the life that preceded her newfound security.
Neglected as a toddler, Lila was rescued by Doll, a canny young drifter, and brought up by her in a hardscrabble childhood. Together they crafted a life on the run, living hand to mouth with nothing but their sisterly bond and a ragged blade to protect them. Despite bouts of petty violence and moments of desperation, their shared life was laced with moments of joy and love. When Lila arrives in Gilead, she struggles to reconcile the life of her makeshift family and their days of hardship with the gentle Christian worldview of her husband which paradoxically judges those she loves.
Revisiting the beloved characters and setting of Robinson's Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead and Home , a National Book Award finalist, Lila is a moving expression of the mysteries of existence that is destined to become an American classic.
Author Notes
Marilynne Robinson's first novel, Housekeeping, won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. Her other novels include Mother Country and Lila. Gilead won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award and Home won the Orange Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her nonfiction books include When I Was a Child I Read Books, Absence of Mind, and The Death of Adam. She was the recipient of a 2012 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama. She received the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction in 2016. She has been named the winner of the Richard C Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award as part of the 2016 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. She was included on Time magazine's annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This third of three novels set in the fictional plains town of Gilead, Iowa, is a masterpiece of prose in the service of the moral seriousness that distinguishes Robinson's work. This time the narrative focuses on Lila, the young bride of elderly Reverend Ames, first met in Gilead. Rescued as a toddler from abusive caretakers by a rough but kind drifter named Doll, raised with love but enduring the hard existence of a field worker, and later, in a St. Louis whorehouse, Lila is a superb creation. Largely uneducated, almost feral, Lila has a thirst for stability and knowledge. As she yearns to forget the terrible memories and shame of her past, Lila is hesitant to reveal them to her loving new husband. The courtship of the couple-John Ames: tentative, tender, shy, and awkward; Lila: naive, suspicious, wary, full of dread-will endure as a classic set piece of character revelation, during which two achingly lonely people discover the comfort of marital love. Threaded through the narrative are John Ames's troubled reflections that the doctrines of his Calvinist theology, including the belief that those who are not saved are destined for hell, are too harsh. Though she reads the Bible to gain knowledge, Lila resists its message, because it teaches that her beloved Doll will never gain the peace of heaven. Her questions stir up doubt in Ames's already conflicted mind, and Robinson carefully crafts this provocative and deeply meaningful spiritual search for the meaning of existence. What brings the couple together is a joyous appreciation of the beauty of the natural world and the possibility of grace. The novel ends with the birth of their son, to whom Ames will leave his diary in Gilead. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* We catch glimpses of the Reverend John Ames' much younger second wife, Lila, in Robinson's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Gilead (2004), the first in a deeply reflective saga set in a small Iowa town, the second volume of which is Home (2008). We now learn Lila's astonishing story, which begins with a thunderbolt opening scene, in which an abused little girl is swept up by a strange young woman called Doll. The two roam the countryside as itinerant workers, settling down just long enough for Lila to learn to read and write. As life grows even more harrowing during the Great Depression, and Doll's dangerous secrets catch up to her, capable and strong Lila fends for herself, ultimately arriving in Gilead. The wanderer and the minister embark on a wondrously unlikely and fitful courtship as Lila asks confounding questions about existence, belief, trust, and justice. Bringing the land to ravishing life, season by season, Robinson sets the tentative lovers' profoundly involving emotional and metaphysical struggles within both the singing web of nature and the indelible stories of the Bible. Robinson has created a tour de force, an unforgettably dramatic odyssey, a passionate and learned moral and spiritual inquiry, a paean to the earth, and a witty and transcendent love story all within a refulgent and resounding novel so beautifully precise and cadenced it wholly transfixes and transforms us. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Robinson's readers will be primed for the well-promoted third title in her cherished Iowa saga as the author tours the country.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
regionalism has always played an important part in American literature, with, say, William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County the iconic Southern example. Those who have read Marilynne Robinson's radiant Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "Gilead," will remember that imaginary town in southernmost Iowa, near the conjunction of Missouri, Kansas and Nebraska - Plains country, partially Southern in spirit and looking west, thereby broadly embodying the essential rural Midwestern America at a seminal period, from the Depression to around 1950. Although American literature isn't usually known for its religious and philosophical novels, we might think of certain essential works, particularly of Melville and Hawthorne, that concern grace and redemption. Robinson's new novel, "Lila," combines these regional and spiritual strains of American writing. Two families are of special interest in the town of Gilead, the Boughtons and the Ameses, each having several generations of Protestant preachers. The narrator of "Gilead," the minister John Ames, both remembers and looks forward across a highly symbolic, almost biblical American landscape, timeless in its simplicity, mired in poverty and sustained by religion. Addressing his son, Ames recounts episodes of family history and confides his philosophical and religious concerns. The next volume, the much-admired "Home," picks up the histories of the two families from the point of view of the Boughtons. The two ministers, Boughton and Ames, careful readers of Feuerbach and Calvin, are thoughtful theologians in the days before television preachers tarnished the good name of the cloth. They are close friends, and though they have some doctrinal disagreements, they have much else to discuss. In "Home," Robinson describes the "decorous turmoil" of the soul of Robert Boughton, the Presbyterian, but neither man preaches, nor expects, hellfire. God is too good. "Thinking about hell doesn't help me live the way I should," Reverend Ames explains. "And thinking that other people might go to hell just feels evil to me, like a very grave sin." With "Lila," the third novel about these families and this town, we understand more clearly the metaphorical nature of the landscape, the era and the history. Lila is a migrant drifter child, then a migrant drifter woman, who eventually becomes the much younger wife of the elderly, widowed John Ames - and the mother of the boy being addressed in the first novel. Lila's personal tale mirrors conventional Dust Bowl stories during the lawless, desperate period of the Depression. When she is a gravely ill child of about 3, she is stolen away from people who might have let her die. Her kidnapper and surrogate mother is a rough woman called Doll, from whom Lila invents a surname for herself: Dahl. Lila and Doll are on the run most of the time, knowing no permanent situation, creature comforts or material possessions. More than once, Doll uses her knife to defend them. When Lila finally winds up in Gilead she has only one prized possession, the knife that belonged to Doll. THE CHILD'S UTTER DEPENDENCE on this woman is shaded by a frightened, tentative wariness that will characterize Lila's bruised emotional life as an adult. The story Robinson tells here concerns the affection Lila feels first for Doll, then for the elderly minister, and his for her, as well as her education and the beginnings of a healed psyche. Told with measured and absorbing elegance, this account of the growing love and trust between Lila and Reverend Ames is touching and convincing. The stages of Lila's strengthening sense of security are carefully delineated, physical relations and her pregnancy handled with careful tact. Central to all the novel's characters are matters of high literary seriousness - the basic considerations of the human condition; the moral problems of existence; the ache of being abandoned; the struggles of the aging; the role of the Bible and God in daily life. It's courageous of Robinson to write about faith at a time when associations with religion are so often negative and violent. And goodness, a property Midwesterners like to think of as a regional birthright, is even harder than piety to convey without succumbing to the temptation to charge it with sanctimony or hypocrisy. That is not the effect of this lovely narrative. Goodness resides in most of the people we meet here, even the madam, known simply as "Mrs.," who runs a whorehouse in St. Louis where Lila briefly lives. Mrs. lets the rather plain Lila off easy, charging her mostly with chores like cleaning and stoking the furnace. It may seem that Lila's chaste escape strains our credulity - when, for some reason, we believe in the sinister desperados met along the course of her odyssey. But we certainly don't wish her fate to have been otherwise. Next to the strange, dreamlike autonomy of characters like Doll, who drift along stealing babies and riding freight cars, the whorehouse scenes in St. Louis seem a little self-consciously cinematic, in spite of the durability of the metaphor - and not only because sin is so naturally allowed for in Robinson's generous understanding of human nature as to make them seem superfluous. The almost jolly atmosphere of the place, with its hearts of gold, threatens to violate the novel's grave tone of original innocence and tentative salvation. As in "Gilead" and "Home," Robinson steps away from the conventions of the realistic novel to deal with metaphysical abstractions, signaling by the formality of her language her adoption of another convention, by which characters inhabiting an almost Norman Rockwell-ish world (it is, after all, the same period) live and think on a spiritual plane without sacrificing the notion that they are, at the same time, weeding the garden or doing the mending. Characters might say things like "I believe also that the rewards of obedience are great, because at the root of real honor is always the sense of the sacredness of the person who is its object," a level of diction that isn't exactly natural speech but one that we understand and respond to with almost reflex admiration, as with Flannery O'Connor or, of course, King James. Throughout these novels, Robinson has a wonderful feel for Midwestern life, for what people would be wearing, eating, reading. (In "Home," for example, she notes that when MacKinlay Kantor, who grew up in Webster City, Iowa, had written the grim Civil War prison novel "Andersonville," "it had broken the heart of greater Des Moines.") Lila's virtue, intelligence and fine instincts prevail over her harsh experiences, but she retains her mistrust of certain things: "I don't understand theology," she says. "I don't think I like it." One wonders if that is Robinson's coda to three novels that involve quite a lot of theology. Very few allusions link life in Gilead to particular historical events, though a character once mentions that he might vote for Eisenhower. Nor is this novel about the specifics of Iowa, despite descriptions of its fields and the mention of a movie theater playing "To Have and Have Not." (If you were to look for a contemporary cinematic equivalent, you might think of the timeless tone and setting of the Coen brothers' "O Brother, Where Art Thou?") In the end, "Lila" is not so much a novel as a meditation on morality and psychology, compelling in its frankness about its truly shocking subject: the damage to the human personality done by poverty, neglect and abandonment. DIANE JOHNSON'S most recent book is a memoir, "Flyover Lives." 'Thinking that other people might go to hell just feels evil to me, like a very grave sin.'
Kirkus Review
More balm in Gilead as Robinson (When I Was a Child I Read Books, 2012, etc.) returns to familiar ground to continue the saga of John Ames and his neighbors. Ames, Robinson's readers will know, is a minister in the hamlet of Gilead, a quiet place in a quiet corner of a quiet Midwestern state. Deceptively quiet, we should say, for Robinson, ever the Calvinist (albeit a gentle and compassionate one), is a master at plumbing the roiling depths below calm surfaces. In this installment, she turns to the title character, Ames' wife, who has figured mostly just in passing in Gilead (2004) and Home (2008). How, after all, did this young outsider wind up in a place so far away from the orbits of most people? What secrets does she bear? It turns out that Lila has quite a story to tell, one of abandonment, want, struggle and redemptionclassic Robinson territory, in other words. Robinson provides Lila with enough back story to fuel several other books, her prose richly suggestive and poetic as she evokes a bygone time before "everyonestarted getting poorer and the wind turned dirty" that merges into a more recent past that seems no less bleak, when Lila, having subsisted on cattails and pine sap, wanders into Gilead just to look at the houses and gardens: "The loneliness was bad, but it was better than anything else she could think of." She never leaves, of course, becoming part of the landscapeand, as readers will learn, essential to the gradually unfolding story of Gilead. And in Robinson's hands, that small town, with its heat and cicadas, its tree toads and morning dew, becomes as real as Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, just as charged with meaning if a touch less ominous, Lila's talismanic knife notwithstanding. Fans of Robinson will wish the book were longerand will surely look forward to the next. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Starred Review. This gentle novel revisits characters in the town of Gilead, IA, the setting of Robinson's earlier novels Home and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead. Whereas Gilead focused on elderly minister John Ames's writing a letter to his seven-year-old son, this new work steps back nearly a decade to explain how John came to meet and marry second wife Lila, with the focus on her past rather than his. A homeless orphan, Lila led an itinerant life under the care of a woman named Doll. It was a life full of hardship, but Doll's love sustained the child. When Lila meets John, their courtship and marriage develop through discussions about the Bible and God, as Lila struggles to reconcile her own suffering with the love and kindness of her husband and his faith. It also proves difficult for her to settle down and to fit in among people whose lives are so different from the one she has lived. As with Gilead, this book is full of ruminations about faith, and it flows in a single gush without chapters. VERDICT While some readers may yearn for more action and structure, this is a lovely and touching story that grapples with the universal question of how God can allow his children to suffer. Recommended for fans of Robinson as well as those who enjoyed Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge, another exploration of pain and loneliness set against the backdrop of a small town. [See Prepub Alert, 4/7/14.] Evelyn Beck, Piedmont Technical Coll., Greenwood, SC (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
The child was just there on the stoop in the dark, hugging herself against the cold, all cried out and nearly sleeping. She couldn't holler anymore and they didn't hear her anyway, or they might and that would make things worse. Somebody had shouted, Shut that thing up or I'll do it! and then a woman grabbed her out from under the table by her arm and pushed her out onto the stoop and shut the door and the cats went under the house. They wouldn't let her near them anymore because she picked them up by their tails sometimes. Her arms were all over scratches, and the scratches stung. She had crawled under the house to find the cats, but even when she did catch one in her hands it struggled harder the harder she held on to it and it bit her, so she let it go. Why you keep pounding at the screen door? Nobody gonna want you around if you act like that. And then the door closed again, and after a while night came. The people inside fought themselves quiet, and it was night for a long time. She was afraid to be under the house, and afraid to be up on the stoop, but if she stayed by the door it might open. There was a moon staring straight at her, and there were sounds in the woods, but she was nearly sleeping when Doll came up the path and found her there like that, miserable as could be, and took her up in her arms and wrapped her into her shawl, and said, "Well, we got no place to go. Where we gonna go?" If there was anyone in the world the child hated worst, it was Doll. She'd go scrubbing at her face with a wet rag, or she'd be after her hair with a busted comb, trying to get the snarls out. Doll slept at the house most nights, and maybe she paid for it by sweeping up a little. She was the only one who did any sweeping, and she'd be cussing while she did it, Don't do one damn bit of good, and someone would say, Then leave it be, dammit. There'd be people sleeping right on the floor, in some old mess of quilts and gunnysacks. You wouldn't know from one day to the next. When the child stayed under the table they would forget her most of the time. The table was shoved into a corner and they wouldn't go to the trouble of reaching under to pull her out of there if she kept quiet enough. When Doll came in at night she would kneel down and spread that shawl over her, but then she left again so early in the morning that the child would feel the shawl slip off and she'd feel colder for the lost warmth of it, and stir, and cuss a little. But there would be hardtack, an apple, something, and a cup of water left there for her when she woke up. Once, there was a kind of toy. It was just a horse chestnut with a bit of cloth over it, tied with a string, and two knots at the sides and two at the bottom, like hands and feet. The child whispered to it and slept with it under her shirt. Lila would never tell anyone about that time. She knew it would sound very sad, and it wasn't, really. Doll had taken her up in her arms and wrapped her shawl around her. "You just hush now," she said. "Don't go waking folks up." She settled the child on her hip and carried her into the dark house, stepping as carefully and quietly as she could, and found the bundle she kept in her corner, and then they went out into the chilly dark again, down the steps. The house was rank with sleep and the night was windy, full of tree sounds. The moon was gone and there was rain, so fine then it was only a tingle on the skin. The child was four or five, long-legged, and Doll couldn't keep her covered up, but she chafed at her calves with her big, rough hand and brushed the damp from her cheek and her hair. She whispered, "Don't know what I think I'm doing. Never figured on it. Well, maybe I did. I don't know. I guess I probly did. This sure ain't the night for it." She hitched up her apron to cover the child's legs and carried her out past the clearing. The door might have opened, and a woman might have called after them, Where you going with that child? and then, after a minute, closed the door again, as if she had done all decency required. "Well," Doll whispered, "we'll just have to see." The road wasn't really much more than a path, but Doll had walked it so often in the dark that she stepped over the roots and around the potholes and never paused or stumbled. She could walk quickly when there was no light at all. And she was strong enough that even an awkward burden like a leggy child could rest in her arms almost asleep. Lila knew it couldn't have been the way she remembered it, as if she were carried along in the wind, and there were arms around her to let her know she was safe, and there was a whisper at her ear to let her know that she shouldn't be lonely. The whisper said, "I got to find a place to put you down. I got to find a dry place." And then they sat on the ground, on pine needles, Doll with her back against a tree and the child curled into her lap, against her breast, hearing the beat of her heart, feeling it. Rain fell heavily. Big drops spattered them sometimes. Doll said, "I should have knowed it was coming on rain. And now you got the fever." But the child just lay against her, hoping to stay where she was, hoping the rain wouldn't end. Doll may have been the loneliest woman in the world, and she was the loneliest child, and there they were, the two of them together, keeping each other warm in the rain. When the rain ended, Doll got to her feet, awkwardly with the child in her arms, and tucked the shawl around her as well as she could. She said, "I know a place." The child's head would drop back, and Doll would heft her up again, trying to keep her covered. "We're almost there." It was another cabin with a stoop, and a dooryard beaten bare. An old black dog got up on his forelegs, then his hind legs, and barked, and an old woman opened the door. She said, "No work for you here, Doll. Nothing to spare." Doll sat down on the stoop. "Just thought I'd rest a little." "What you got there? Where'd you get that child?" "Never mind." "Well, you better put her back." "Maybe. Don't think I will, though." "Better feed her something, at least." Doll said nothing. The old woman went into the house and brought out a scrap of corn bread. She said, "I was about to do the milking. You might as well go inside, get her in out of the cold." Doll stood with her by the stove, where there was just the little warmth of the banked embers. She whispered, "You hush. I got something for you here. You got to eat it." But the child couldn't rouse herself, couldn't keep her head from lolling back. So Doll knelt with her on the floor to free her hands, and pinched off little pills of corn bread and put them in the child's mouth, one after another. "You got to swallow." The old woman came back with a pail of milk. "Warm from the cow," she said. "Best thing for a child." That strong, grassy smell, raw milk in a tin cup. Doll gave it to her in sips, holding her head in the crook of her arm. "Well, she got something in her, if she keeps it down. Now I'll put some wood on the fire and we can clean her up some." When the room was warmer and the water in the kettle was warm, the old woman held her standing in a white basin on the floor by the stove and Doll washed her down with a rag and a bit of soap, scrubbing a little where the cats had scratched her, and on the chigger bites and mosquito bites where she had scratched herself, and where there were slivers in her knees, and where she had a habit of biting her hand. The water in the basin got so dirty they threw it out the door and started over. Her whole body shivered with the cold and the sting. "Nits," the old woman said. "We got to cut her hair." She fetched a razor and began shearing off the tangles as close to the child's scalp as she dared--"I got a blade here. She better hold still." Then they soaped and scrubbed her head, and water and suds ran into her eyes, and she struggled and yelled with all the strength she had and told them both they could rot in hell. The old woman said, "You'll want to talk to her about that." Doll touched the soap and tears off the child's face with the hem of her apron. "Never had the heart to scold her. Them's about the only words I ever heard her say." They made her a couple of dresses out of flour sacks with holes cut in them for her head and arms. They were stiff at first and smelled of being saved in a chest or a cupboard, and they had little flowers all over them, like Doll's apron. * * * It seemed like one long night, but it must have been a week, two weeks, rocking on Doll's lap while the old woman fussed around them. "You don't have enough trouble, I guess. Carrying off a child that's just going to die on you anyway." "Ain't going to let her die." "Oh? When's the last time you got to decide about something?" "If I left her be where she was, she'da died for sure." "Well, maybe her folks won't see it that way. They know you took her? What you going to say when they come looking for her? She's buried in the woods somewhere? Out by the potato patch? I don't have troubles enough of my own?" Doll said, "Nobody going to come looking." "You probly right about that. That's the spindliest damn child I ever saw." But the whole time she talked she'd be stirring a pot of grits and blackstrap molasses. Doll would give the child a spoonful or two, then rock her a little while, then give her another spoonful. She rocked her and fed her all night long, and dozed off with her cheek against the child's hot forehead. The old woman got up now and then to put more wood in the stove. "She keeping it down?" "Mostly." "She taking any water?" "Some." When the old woman went away again Doll would whisper to her, "Now, don't you go dying on me. Put me to all this bother for nothing. Don't you go dying." And then, so the child could barely hear, "You going to die if you have to. I know. But I got you out of the rain, didn't I? We're warm here, ain't we?" After a while the old woman again. "Put her in my bed if you want. I guess I won't be sleeping tonight, either." "I got to make sure she can breathe all right." "Let me set with her then." "She's clinging on to me." "Well." The old woman brought the quilt from her bed and spread it over them. The child could hear Doll's heart beating and she could feel the rise and fall of her breath. It was too warm and she felt herself struggling against the quilt and against Doll's arms and clinging to her at the same time with her arms around her neck. Copyright © 2014 by Marilynne Robinson Excerpted from Lila by Marilynne Robinson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
