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Marilynne Robinson
Book Club March 10, 2024
Many readers interpret and assimilate a novel solely within the context of their own experience, viewpoint and opinions. For them the work is a mirror, and they typically evaluate it based on whether and to what extent it validates the reader’s perspective. But there is such a thing as independent viewpoint. If it were not vital to understand perspectives other than one’s own and take them into account, there would be no point to literature. Because the story of a work of literature is not in the narrative that is reflected from the pages onto the reader, the story is the traces of the author’s efforts to make the reader recognize that an independent voice exists and to transmit it.
In 2015 a blogger calling themselves “Issendai” published a lengthy series of posts titled “Down the Rabbit Hole: The world of estranged parents’ forums”.1 In the introduction, Issendai explained that they have had a long interest in stories of abuse suffered at the hands of people with narcissistic personality disorders. They wanted insights into the viewpoint of the abuser as well, but assumed it would never be possible to find an honest recounting of offenses from the offender’s side.
That is, until Issendai stumbled onto the world of online support forums for estranged parents of adult children. In those forums, parents give lengthy and detailed accounts of their relationships with their children, the breakdowns, the estrangement, and the parents’ attempts to reconnect.
In reading their stories it quickly becomes apparent that the parents are narcissists with long histories of abuse of their children. It is also apparent that a symptom of that narcissism is refusal to assimilate their children’s perspectives:
The default position is “estranged parent good, estranged child bad,” and members treat their children’s and grandchildren’s boundaries as a display of defiance that must be crushed.
The most haunting theme of the stories is the parents’ wondering about the reasons for the estrangement:
one of the cries of the estranged parent movement is, “Why won’t they tell us why?”
But reading the accounts in depth makes it clear that the children have told the parents in excruciating detail why they broke contact, and their conditions for reconciliation. The routine reaction of the parents is to brand the testimony given them as lies, or simply to dismiss their childrens’ reasons as invalid.
The question “Why?” hangs over Marilynne Robinson’s novel Home like a pall. Set in 1956 in the small town of Gilead, Iowa, where a woman named Glory Boughton is caretaker for her elderly retired Presbyterian minister father Robert, the domestic routine is disrupted when their estranged brother/son Jack suddenly communicates that he is going to try coming home after a disappearance that has lasted two decades.
Why did he leave? Why had he always been so stand-offish? Jack, the bright, talented, charming one in a close-knit, gregarious family of eight children always seemed to hold himself back, preferring an inner sanctuary to participating in group events. His reserve degenerated to delinquency and petty theft in his teens. He drank and caroused through his first two years of college until he impregnated a local girl but refused to marry her – the one crossed boundary his father couldn’t overlook. Jack then disappeared, thereafter (as understood by sparse accounts of him filtering back) living hand-to-mouth, on the road, in and out of menial jobs and jail.
Reverend Boughton professes that he is honestly eager to reconcile with Jack, and Jack seems game to try himself, but they can’t find ways to approach one another; they are oil and water.
Robert has a life-long friend, Congregationalist minister John Ames, who serves as his confidant, confessor and good-humored antagonist in decades of debates and religious disputes. Ames is so close to the Boughton family that Jack sees him as amounting to an alternate father. Jack makes an attempt at rapprochement with him as an entree to breaking the impasse with his father, but finds himself the subject of a stinging rebuke in the form of a Sunday sermon from Ames, as he relates to Glory:
“Ah, little sister, these old fellows play rough. They look so harmless,
and the next thing you know, you’re counting broken bones again.”
“What happened?”
“He preached. The text was Hagar and Ishmael, the application was the
disgraceful abandonment of children by their fathers. And the illustration
was my humble self, sitting there beside his son with the eyes of Gilead
upon me. I think I was aghast. His intention, no doubt. To appall me, that
is, to turn me white, as I am sure he did.”
The crux of the novel comes when Jack tries finally to confront both Ames and his father about his state of estrangement from them; angrily, but stealthily, in a form that his father is predisposed to give ear to – a theological debate:
“I’ve wondered from time to time if I might not be an instance of
predestination. A sort of proof. If I may not experience predestination in
my own person. That would be interesting, if the consequences were not so
painful. |For other people. If it did not seem as though I spread a
contagion of s ome |kind. Of misfortune. Is that possible?”
Ames said, “No. That isn’t possible. Not at all…”
Jack said, “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be disrespectful. My question is,
are there people who are simply born evil, live evil lives, and then go to
hell?”
Ames took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Scripture is not really
clear on that point. Generally, a person’s behavior is consistent with his
nature…”
Boughton chuckled. “Do I detect a little circularity in your reasoning,
Reverend Eisenhower?…”
Lila said, “What about being saved?… If you can’t change, there don’t
seem much point in it…”
“Mrs. Ames has made an excellent point,” Boughton said, his voice
statesmanlike… “Yes, I worried a long time about how the mystery of
predestination could be reconciled with the mystery of salvation.”
“No conclusions?”
“None that I can recall just now.” He said, “It seems as though the
conclusions are never as interesting as the questions. I mean, they’re not
what you remember.” He closed his eyes.
This exchange lays bare the natures of Boughton, Ames and Jack, and the irreconcilable differences between them.
Boughton may be capable of a measure of charity and of hope, but he lacks faith. He has filled the hole missing faith has left in his soul with certainty of the rightness of his arguments – and the price of relationship or reconciliation with him is never to challenge that certainty in any meaningful way. That is why he mail orders trunkfuls of books on theology but doesn’t read them (for years Jack hid money, bad report cards and teacher’s notes in their pages, knowing they’d never be found). That is why he revels in his decades-long debate series with Ames, interpreting their lack of resolution as confirmation of the unassailability of his positions. More likely Ames has taken his measure and discreetly allows him to believe the debates go on, for the sake of their friendship, when actually Ames has already dismissed him out of hand.
Ames has neither faith nor charity. He is a pharisee. That is, he values the Word and the Law over compassion for his charges. And what he most values about the Law is that it validates his position as preacher, minister and head of the church, which makes him the decider as to who is to be a member of the congregation and who is to be cast out. And the price for his grace is never to challenge or point out the irreconcilable contradictions in his beliefs and actions, the cracks in the foundation of his religion that the Word and the Law plaster over.
And so Jack can’t communicate with his father because he is unwilling to profess a faith or salvation that he doesn’t believe in. But much more passionately, he can’t bear Ames’ hypocrisy. He lays out to Ames that the Word and the Law require that Ames must either accept predestination entirely (in which case the preacher has no special place in God’s plan), or he must accept Jack back into the community with an open hand and a forgiving heart. To do otherwise makes Ames a sinner. Damningly, Ames understands perfectly well the thrust of Jack’s argument, and continues to rebuff him anyway, doing what he has always done with the senior Boughton: sweep irreconcilable conflicts under the rug.
After the above exchange, the Whys of the story are illuminated – Jack’s independent viewpoint can at last be understood. As the brightest among his siblings, Jack from an early age sensed his father’s shortcomings and his godfather’s hypocrisy. Though perhaps he could not articulate his misgivings, neither could he ignore them and join in family activities wholeheartedly as the other, duller children did.
At some point Jack realized consciously just what his father was and was not. And like Biff in Death of a Salesman, the insight shattered his world in a way that he could not recover from. Like Biff, he cleared out; and ate the bitter bread of the exile, mixed with the dust of the road, in penance for sins that were not his. And like Biff, after long painful years he allowed himself to forget somewhat why he left, and thence hoped that perhaps there was a way he could return. What he found, however, was renewed clarity about what drove him to depart, and acceptance of why he can never come home.
But with illumination comes grace, and on the last page the reader discovers that Jack is despite all in a state of grace; unlike his fathers, who ultimately are revealed to be narcissists. Though lacking faith, Jack is a penitant, mourning the world’s sins and able to feel compassion and charity toward those who truly suffer. And because he is in a state of grace his prayers will be answered: after the passing of more long years has washed the family’s sins down the river, Jack’s son will be welcomed into his house the way he never could be.