Home

did NOT think i would be underlining every other page of this very white christian novel but here we are. it was utterly miserable and so much more bleak than it seems to let on. at the same time i liked it more than gilead, i think i appreciate the messages being conveyed in gilead more than i did in home.

also...lots of reviews ive read said this was super boring and i can't disagree but also i want to add that i just wasn't bored. i don't even know how i wasn't bc i have horrible attention span. but marilynne robinson would be like (beautifully) “glory made breakfast without realizing it was 3 in the morning. jack laughed at her” and i'd just be like oh my fucking god i simply have to keep reading i need to know more

Short Review: I have been reluctant to read Home because it is the last of Robinson's books of fiction. And now that I have read it there are no more fiction books by Robinson to read (although she hinted last year that she is working on another). Home is my least favorite of the trilogy, although it is not by any means a bad book. It is just that the other two are among my favorite books ever.

I am not sure whether this was really the intention, but this felt like a broken retelling of the story of the prodigal son. Rev Boughton, John Ames' best friend is the father of eight children and near the end of his life. His prodigal son and oldest child, Jack, has been gone for 20 years, but comes back home. Glory, the baby, after a failed relationship has returned to the town of Gilead to care for her father and heal her own wounds.

This is not a book of action but a book about people and ideas. There is a plot but it is the beauty of the words, the insight into people and ideas, mostly theological questions and insights that are what draws me to Robinson's fiction.

My full review is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/home/

How much context should we bring to a novel? Should we consider the writer's other works? Should the author's biography inform the reading of a particular novel?

I would like to read a book independent of its context. While the text may have an historical context that comes from without, what we should care about is within the text. Yet, when I read John Cheever's Falconer I couldn't help but consider the author's other work. The novel is so different from what I think of as John Cheever.

The novel centers on an upper-middle-class heroin in Falconer prison for murdering his brother. Other than the upper-middle-class part, there is little in common with the characters that inhabit most of Cheever's writing. But it goes beyond the setting and the protagonist. The writing itself is loose, casual, colored with flourishes. At times it is brutal, infused with violence and obscenity, and at others it is dreamlike, fantastical.

Falconer is not a suburban novel. It is a prison novel, filled with the things that make up prison life. Shocking, naturally, but even more shocking in contrast to Cheever's other work. At the same time, it never feels like the other is trying to shock us. He doesn't show us the violence and sex in order to make us gasp about the awfulness of it or to prove that he can shock. Falconer is given to us from the point of view of a character who has, in a way, given up. He is not shocked by what comes his way. Not resigned, but not amused. He doesn't completely accept his fate, but his attempts at change are only derived from desperation. Even when he experiences strong emotion, he seems to be documenting it in order to make it true. At the novel's ending, he has gone through change and maybe we can believe that he is capable of the emotion he describes, but he is so over the top that we can help but doubt him.

In all, context or not, more like Denis Johnson than John Cheever, the novel was a good read.

Sigh, Marilynne Robinson, you are so good at writing. I actually bought this a year ago and then was scared to read it because I've been reading so much YA lit that I didn't think I was up to tackling this. But, duh, it was great. It had enough tiny suspenses and it was so well-written that I moved through it much faster than I had anticipated. (When I think of MR, I think of beautiful writing, but also a very leisurely pace.)It's been awhile since I read [b:Gilead 68210 Gilead Marilynne Robinson http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1316637613s/68210.jpg 2481792] so I'm not sure how closely this ties into it, except that Ames is in it as a peripheral character. I just don't remember how much the Boughtons were in Gilead. But it didn't really hinder my enjoyment of the book at all, so, yay.

I loved it. Addresses spiritual and “meaning of life” issues in a very genuine and interesting manner.

If I think too hard about the fact that this is the first work of fiction I've finished since January, I'll get really sad. Grad school, BAH.

So instead I'll sing Marilynne Robinson's praises. I read “Gilead” in 2007, and some of the same characters from the town of Gilead reappear here, in this retelling of the story of the prodigal son. Robinson has a real knack for writing about faith without being either cheesy or preachy, and gives a simultaneously delicate yet incisive voice to family dynamics–present, past, and our memories of both, even as the present unfolds and the past is dredged up. She is one of those novelists who I will always want to read what she has thought fit to write.

I had checked out Home when it first came out but turned it quickly back when, thinking it was too much like Gilead. The reviews for Home continued to pour in and all of them were good. So I went back to it. And loved it. Robinson knows the Prodigal Son.