Lonesome Road

Throughout the Gilead books, Robinson relates events from different points of view.Photograph by Ryan Pfluger

Marilynne Robinson’s new novel, “Lila” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), opens in about 1920, and it begins with a shocking action: a woman steals a child. Not that anybody seems to care much. The child, a girl who looks to be four or five, has been deposited by someone (there is no mention of parents) in a house for migrant workers somewhere in the Midwest. Most of the time, she hides under a table, but occasionally she cries, and then she gets pushed out onto the front steps. One night, a woman named Doll, the sole denizen of the house who appears ever to have paid any attention to the girl, returns from work and finds her on the stoop. This time, instead of settling her back inside, Doll carries her off to another cabin, where an old woman grudgingly lets them in. The two women feed the girl some corn bread and then try to clean her up:

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 that 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.

Despite the chiggers and the curses, the scene is pure Rembrandt. We can almost see the ray of heavenly light coming through the side window. Ever since the publication of Robinson’s thrilling first novel, “Housekeeping” (1980), reviewers have been pointing out that, for an analyst of modern alienation, she is an unusual specimen: a devout Protestant, reared in Idaho. She now lives in Iowa City, where she teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and where, for years, she has been accustomed to interrupting her career as a novelist to produce essays on such matters as the truth of John Calvin’s writings. But Robinson’s Low Church allegiance has hugely benefitted her fiction. It is certainly responsible, in part, for her extreme directness. In that bath scene, in “Lila,” the author lays out, right at the start, all the novel’s main themes: suffering, abandonment, forgiveness, rescue, and then, in bracing counterpoise, the question of whether one actually wants to be rescued, or can be. The scene also contains the book’s governing metaphor, water, which will wash away our sins—or not. And there, in the middle of the water, naked and screaming, is the book’s heroine. She does not speak except to curse, Doll reports. She has no name that she can tell them. Eventually, the old woman says, “I been thinking about ‘Lila.’ I had a sister Lila. Give her a pretty name, maybe she could turn out pretty.” After a few weeks, Doll and Lila take off down the road and join a work crew.

Some of us have met Lila before. Since “Housekeeping,” Robinson has written three novels—“Gilead” (2004), “Home” (2008), and now “Lila”—centered in Gilead, Iowa, a dusty, no-account little town, where dogs take their naps in the middle of Main Street. Gilead, however, was once at the heart of a great passion. It was a stop on the Underground Railroad and, in time, a hot spot of the Union Army’s cause, under the town’s Congregationalist minister, a fiery-eyed man who had audible conversations with Jesus. That man’s son and then his grandson succeeded to his pulpit, and it is the grandson, John Ames, who is the most important figure in the series so far. In “Gilead,” Ames, as a young man, marries the girl whom everyone in town expects him to marry. She dies in childbirth, and the baby dies with her. Ames goes on alone. By day, he writes his sermons and reads books of philosophy, theology, and history. At night, he eats a fried-egg sandwich, listens to the radio, and goes to bed. This continues for forty years, and he expects it to continue for the rest of his life. But then, one Sunday, while he is preaching—he is now sixty-seven—the back door of the church opens, and a woman slips into the sanctuary, to get out of the rain. Her dress is shabby. Her eyes are sad. She didn’t grow up to be pretty. It is Lila.

Their circumstances could not be more different. He is almost twice her age. Furthermore, he is an erudite man, however isolated and obscure, while she is a transient worker. In “Lila,” with her bedroll and a small suitcase (she owns two dresses), she goes from place to place, asking at houses in the towns and the countryside for a day’s work. She was on her way to Sioux City when, approaching Gilead, she spotted an abandoned shack. She has been camping out there for a few weeks when, as she is walking in the town, a storm breaks and she ducks into Ames’s church.

As Ames tells us in “Gilead,” he falls in love instantly, and though he is too modest to say that she seems attracted to him also, he hints at this. She asks him about the possibility of baptism. “No one seen to it for me when I was a child,” she says. “I been feeling the lack of it.” Most suggestively, she starts turning up in the garden behind his house, to tend to it—pull weeds, plant roses. (She has a special talent with roses.) At first, she makes sure to come when she knows he won’t be there. Eventually, she omits that caution. Then, one evening, according to Ames, “when I saw her there, out by the wonderful roses, I said, ‘How can I repay you for all this?’ And she said, ‘You ought to marry me.’ And I did.” It is like a miracle: sudden, inexplicable.

Ames is a kind of character that people say novelists can’t create, an exceptionally virtuous person who is nevertheless interesting. As it happens, he has a few failings. He is sometimes bitter about the fact that he has spent his life stuck in Gilead, baptizing babies (his brother became a professor, and an atheist), and he grieved that he had no children. His best friend, Robert Boughton, the town’s Presbyterian minister, fathered eight. At times, when Boughton’s children were still young, Ames couldn’t bear to enter his friend’s house. (If the two men were working together on a project, Boughton’s wife would pack a dinner for them to eat in Ames’s kitchen.) Then comes Lila and, in short order, a child, Robby, named after Boughton. But no sooner does Ames receive these gifts than he is told that he must lose them. The doctor says that he has angina pectoris and won’t live long. That would be hard enough, but Ames is desperately worried about how Lila and Robby will fare without him. Boughton has a son, Jack, who could be a character out of Dostoyevsky. As a boy, Jack liked to steal things, break things, and then smile when he was caught. As a young man, he got a fifteen-year-old country girl pregnant and promptly left town. Now, after twenty years, Jack has returned to Gilead, and Ames thinks he sees him hanging around Lila and Robby. What rises in his heart is not just concern but hatred.

Ames is a sort of visionary—a trait that would appear to mark him as saintly—but, as with other saints, not all of his visions are beautiful. In “Gilead,” he remembers a windy night when he walked beneath a row of oaks:

They were dropping their acorns thick as hail almost. There was all sorts of thrashing in the leaves and there were acorns hitting the pavement so hard they’d fly past my head. All this in the dark, of course. I remember a slice of moon, no more than that. It was a very clear night, or morning, very still, and then there was such energy in these things transpiring among those trees, like a storm, like travail. I stood a little out of range, and I thought, It is all still new to me.

It’s as though he had seen a ghost.

With all this in his head, plus the learned books, he can sometimes fail to notice what is in front of his face. When he speaks of his coming together with Lila, which he regards as the most glorious event of his life, what appears to please him most is the idea that he gave her a settled existence, a settled mind. “It seemed that all the wondering about life had been answered for her, once and for all,” he says. “If that is true, it is wonderful.”

It isn’t true. The most forceful piece of technical machinery operating in Robinson’s Gilead books is point-of-view narration. “Gilead” is written in the first person: Ames speaking to us, or, rather, to Robby (it is a letter for the boy to read when he is grown). “Lila,” like “Home,” employs a tight—that is, heavily filtered—third-person. As Henry James put it, the narrative emerges from a “central intelligence.” (Lila is “she,” not “I,” but everything is recorded as she alone sees it.) Each of the three Gilead books can stand on its own. I didn’t hear anybody complaining, when “Gilead” was published, that we were getting only Ames’s side of the story. Who cared about another side? Ames’s point of view was truer, or at least more interesting, than any purportedly real truth. But now Robinson has followed up “Gilead” with “Home” and “Lila,” which often, while covering the same events as “Gilead,” contradict that book, and each other, too. Or, if they don’t actually catch each other in lies, they still manage, by omission or inclusion or shading, to cast a different light on matters. Robinson is now very obtrusively using point of view. To what end?

“Larry! No!”

Few people who have read “Gilead” will forget Ames’s description of his and Lila’s decision, among the roses, to get married—the speed, the wildness of it—but I hope nobody ever asks me to choose between that and the version that Lila, in “Lila,” gives of the same event. In her version, she is not in a nice, symbolic garden. She is walking down a dusty road, with Ames beside her. She didn’t invite him to accompany her, and yet, once he does, she tells him that he should marry her. It’s crazy, but so is his answer: “You’re right. I will.” Her rejoinder is equally crazy: “All right. Then I’ll see you tomorrow.” In fact, they have no plans to meet the next day. She is just saying that so that she can get away from him for a moment.

In Lila’s life, one emotion trumps all others, and that is shame: over her poverty, her lack of beauty, her ignorance, and, since these facts determined her choices in life, over her life. She wasn’t ditched just once but several times. She did a stint in a brothel, though she wasn’t a very good prostitute—she couldn’t see the point of high heels, for example—and she eventually switched to being the institution’s cleaning lady. That was right before she went to Gilead. When she attends Ames’s Sunday services, she always sits in the back row, so that no one can see her, judge her. But how, if she is so filled with shame, could she have proposed marriage to Ames? There, I think, lies the secret of Lila, as a character: boldness, the perception and expression of truth, combined with a certainty, based on her past experience, that she will be cast aside.

That is what she expects from Ames, and after saying that she will see him tomorrow she scrupulously avoids him. A few days later, he goes to her shack, and finds her coming up from the river, barefoot, with a catfish that she has just caught. He says that he has brought her a gift, his mother’s locket:

She felt her face warm. And the fish kept struggling, jumping against her leg. She said, “Damn catfish. Seems like you can never quite kill ’em dead. I’m going to just put it here in the weeds for a minute.” And there it was, flopping in the dust. She wiped her hand on her skirt. “I can take that chain now, whatever it is.”

He said, “Excellent. I’m—grateful. You should put it on. It’s a little difficult to fasten. My mother always asked my father to do it for her.”

Lila said, “Is that a fact,” and handed it back to him. He studied her for a moment, and then he said, “You’ll have to do something with your hair. If you could lift it up.” So she did, and he stepped behind her, and she felt the touch of his fingers at her neck, trembling, and the small weight of the locket falling into place. Then they stood there together in the road, in the chirping, rustling silence and the sound of the river.

After this beautiful scene, the only episode in “Lila” that you could call a sex scene, Ames says, “So. Are we getting married or not?” Lila answers that she doesn’t think it’s a good idea. The abstemious Robinson allows Ames only a tiny, and therefore especially poignant, reaction. (“His face reddened and he had to steady his voice.”) Lila quickly tries to explain. If she married him, she says, she would be the preacher’s wife, and people would look at her all the time, to see if she measured up. She couldn’t bear that. That’s why she can’t even get baptized. Ames protests that if she wants to get baptized they don’t need a church. They can do it right there, in the field, with water from her bucket. Yes? she says. Then hold on. And she goes to her shack and changes into a clean blouse. Then he baptizes her, resting his hand three times on her hair. She bursts into tears. Ames loans her his handkerchief.

“Wait,” she says to him. “Can you still get married to somebody you baptized?” “No law against it,” he says. She tells him that she wants him but that she doesn’t trust him not to discard her. (“I done some things in my life”; she goes ahead and mentions the brothel.) Nor does she trust herself not to walk away from him. This long scene overflows with lyricism and tenderness and sensuousness—the locket, the tears, the trembling fingers—but buried in the middle is some dark, ugly business that you can’t fully see: Lila’s and Ames’s loneliness, endured for so many years, and probably largely ineradicable. As they embrace, the slimy catfish wriggles in the dirt, ready to die. When the afternoon is over, they have agreed to marry, and you feel as though you have to go lie down.

But Lila and Ames are not just a couple of people in Iowa. As much as Natasha Rostova and Andrei Bolkonsky, they represent their country’s history, and that is the second department in which Robinson has made point-of-view narration work for her powerfully. In “Gilead,” Ames tells us that his grandfather preached the town “into the war,” the Civil War, with the result, Robinson suggests, that most of the young men in Gilead died. This turned the grandfather’s son, Ames’s father, into a pacifist. On Sundays, he did not attend his father’s service; he went to the Quakers instead, creating a terrible breach within the family. That is a flashback; “Gilead” is set mostly at the beginning of the civil-rights movement. “Home” takes place in the year of the Montgomery bus boycott, 1956. Boughton and Ames watch the events on Boughton’s new appliance, a television.

“Lila” is less concerned with race than just with poverty—indeed, starvation—among the migrant workers of the Midwest. We hear what they ate, when they had anything to eat: basically, fried mush. When Lila is abandoned for the second time, it is by a decent person, the head of the work crew that she and Doll joined at the beginning of the book. The crew can’t afford to feed her anymore. Robinson didn’t need point-of-view narration in order to delineate these matters, but she certainly makes it enrich the situation. In “Home,” Boughton, watching the Montgomery riots, says that the rioters are unwise to make such a fuss. He doesn’t know that his son Jack is married to a black woman whom he met after he left Gilead. Jack, returning to Gilead, asks Ames: could he and his wife and their son make a home in that town? Ames says no, for which he has a solid, political reason (a small black community was forced out of Gilead years earlier) and also a selfish, personal reason (Ames wants Jack nowhere near Lila). This is the way politics operates in our lives, on the bone.

Robinson’s use of politics is also, to some extent, a weakness of the Gilead novels. It is in these matters that we start to get clichés, so foreign, otherwise, to her work. Discussing the victims of the Dust Bowl, she apostrophizes: How can that be? “People only trying to get by, and no respect for them at all, even the wind soiling them.” If I am not mistaken, what we are getting here is Robinson’s moral-essayist voice, in opposition to her novelistic voice. Both “Home” and “Lila” sag in the middle, as Robinson shakes her finger at whoever she thinks needs to learn a lesson. I’m not saying that great novelists haven’t done this before (see “War and Peace”), only that it didn’t necessarily benefit their work. Robinson writes about religion two ways. One is meliorist, reformist. The other is rapturous, visionary. Many people have been good at the first kind; few at the second kind, at least today.

The second kind is Robinson’s forte. She knows this, and works it. She inverts time, she loops it, she dispenses with whole chunks of it. (We never find out what Lila did for most of her adult life, before arriving in Gilead.) When Robinson likes an image, she’ll use it as many times as she wants to. If the young Lila gets ditched more than once, other children, too, are abandoned. Married and pregnant, Lila, in “Lila,” revisits her old shack and finds that it has been taken over by a boy, maybe twelve years old, who has been thrown out by his father. (The father chased him down the road, throwing rocks and sticks at him. “The way you’d chase off a dog,” the boy says.) Winter is coming. Lila, after hearing the boy’s story, goes back to town to get him some warm clothes and food. While she is gone, he takes fright and runs away, with nothing. A blizzard arrives, shutting Lila and Ames in their house. Sitting in their kitchen, playing cards and waiting for their baby to come, they are in a sort of daze—thrilled that their child is about to be born, but aware that another child, the renegade boy, is out there, dying in the snow. Add one boy; take one away. “Lila”—and “Home” also—is in many ways a realistic novel. It tells us how to make biscuits and harness a mule. At the same time, Robinson shows us griefs that go far beyond the bounds of realism. In “Housekeeping,” there’s a woman who is certain that she sees the ghosts of naked little children by the road at night, hungry and crying. She puts out food for them. The dogs eat it. She puts out more. In a way, that’s Marilynne Robinson.

But most of the time Robinson’s people aren’t actually starving; they’re just alone. That is the final meaning of her insistence on her characters’ own point of view: because they don’t see the same reality, they are consigned to solitude. Lila tells us that, as Ames’s wife, she was just as lonely as she had been before she married him. And the horrible, or at least extremely arresting, thing is that Robinson doesn’t entirely regret the situation. Lila, soon after the birth of her son, begins having fantasies of opening her front door and walking back out into her old life, and taking the baby with her:

But she imagined the old man, the Reverend, calling after them, “Where are you going with that child?” The sadness in his voice would be terrible. He would be surprised to hear it. You wouldn’t even know your body had a sound like that in it. And it would be familiar to her. She didn’t imagine it, she remembered that sadness from somewhere, and it was as if she would understand something if she could hear it again. That was what she almost wanted.

Life without comfort, without love, that is the real life, and Lila would like to understand why. This is an unflinching book. ♦