FICTION: Home by Marilynne RobinsonVirago, 325pp, £16.99
AFTER A 24-year silence, Marilynne Robinson returned to fiction with her second novel, Gilead. By any standards, that novel - an international bestseller and Pulitzer-winner in 2005 - was a surprising success.
An epistolary novel, (in which the elderly Reverend John Ames, a Congregationalist minister living in the eponymous small Midwestern American town, writes to his young son, Robbie, whom time will not allow him to see grow up) Gileadwas a sensation for its very lack of sensation - an unashamedly literary novel about a stilled life, lived on the margins, devoted to stern, unfashionable religious belief and a rigorously examined interior existence.
Homeis also set in Gilead; once again John Ames appears, but on the periphery. This time the central character is Jack Boughton, who featured briefly in the previous novel, the prodigal son of Ames's friend, the Reverend Boughton, a retired Presbyterian minister.
After 20 years away, Jack returns home, a destitute 43-year-old alcoholic and atheist, who has been in and out of jail for unspecified crimes. His elderly father is ailing and being cared for by his sister, Glory, the baby of the family. A former schoolteacher, recovering from a broken relationship, she is also seeking solace in the balm of Gilead. Temporarily, she hopes.
It is 1961, although the outside world makes very little impression in Gilead or on the sepulchral home of the title. The radio brings news of the Freedom Riders riots in Montgomery, Alabama, about which father and son quarrel briefly. (His father said, "There's no reason to let that sort of trouble upset you. In six months nobody will remember one thing about it." Jack said, "Some people will probably remember it.")
Otherwise, Gilead seems set in aspic. Jack's return, nonetheless, excites great agitation in the household. His father, who blames himself for his son's waywardness and estrangement from loved ones - both his birth family and the teenage wife and daughter Jack abandoned 20 years before - is desperate to work out the why of his own and Jack's failure.
Glory, for her part, is angry not for Jack's years of absence but for the fact that he was always, in some way, lost. What right did he have to be so strange, she demands crossly of him as a child. As a boy he would disappear for hours and this persistent opting out of family life - a crowded one of seven siblings who filled the now silent rooms of the house with childish clamour - still rankles with her. She recalls his "wry distance, as if there were injury for him in the fact that all of them were native to their life as he never could be".
The washed-up remnants of that clan - the querulous father, the defeated son and the quietly resentful daughter - struggle through the months of repatriation, each trying to make sense of the prodigal's return. The father, guided by his faith, is determined to forgive, but cannot understand. Jack, deferential (he calls his father "Sir") but defiantly silent about his years away, is touchy about his reputation as the family's black sheep, particularly in Gilead, where it is the only identity possible. Glory, watchful and reticent, creeps around him terrified that any false move of hers will drive her brother away.
Jack spends his days trying to avoid the bar and watching out for the postman. He is waiting for an answer to the dozens of letters he writes to Della, "a pious lady" whom he says has "had a good effect on his character". That is all he will say of her. Soon the letters begin to be returned unopened and Jack's already wilting optimism withers. His presence in Gilead, Glory realises, is as much about proving himself worthy of Della as it is in making his peace with his father.
The soporific tenor of the household is lovingly observed. Meals are prepared, vegetables grown, crossword puzzles are finished, laundry is done. The high points of the narrative, such as they are, are the purchase of a television or a trip into the countryside in the restored family car. Every time Jack leaves, however, the very house seems to hold its breath for fear he will fall off the wagon, or simply fail to return. The ticking house, full of deep silences, noisy memories and old faiths that cannot be recovered, is as much a character in the novel as any of the dramatis personae. Any one over the age of 40 will remember houses like this, musty repositories of a certain kind of worthy authenticity.
ROBINSON'S PROSE IS BEAUTIFULand lusciously startling. That restored car gleams "like a ripe plum", old man Boughton's thinning fine hair is "a soft white cloud-like harmless aspiration, like a mist given off by the endless work of dreaming", washed cucumbers smell "like evening, like chill".
There is no grand resolution. Jack, who is the only one of the three who accepts his lostness as his particular fate, realises that all he can offer his father is a reassurance that he has not lost his faith. But, he remarks, even after a life of deception and betrayal, honesty is the one scruple he has left.
Days after he leaves home - for good this time, one feels - having resisted the temptation to offer false comfort to his father, the longed-for Della materialises in person. "The driver of the car was a black woman and that was a curious thing. There were no coloured people in Gilead," Glory remarks. There is a boy with her, clearly Jack's son, Glory realises, but it is all too late and has been, right from the start.
This may all sound very Hardy-esque, too determinedly doom-laden. But strangely, that is not the prevailing atmosphere of the book. The minute but profound observation of character, the tiny truces that are achieved through discretion, deference and apology, make this novel seem charged with a gritty, hard-won hope.
Robinson insists on the impossibility of love yet celebrates its manifestation on every page in the small, exquisite gestures of grace her flawed characters manage, in their failure, to bestow on one another.
Mary Morrissy is a novelist and short-story writer. She is the 2008/09 Jenny McKean Moore writer at George Washington University