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Amazon Sales Rank: 1635 Publication Date: 2008-09-02 Release Date: 2008-09-02
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN: 0374299102 Type: Hardcover Number Of Pages: 336
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Hundreds of thousands were enthralled by the luminous voice of John Ames in Gilead, Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel. Home is an entirely independent, deeply affecting novel that takes place concurrently in the same locale, this time in the household of Reverend Robert Boughton, Ames’s closest friend. Glory Boughton, aged thirty-eight, has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father. Soon her brother, Jack—the prodigal son of the family, gone for twenty years—comes home too, looking for refuge and trying to make peace with a past littered with tormenting trouble and pain. Jack is one of the great characters in recent literature. A bad boy from childhood, an alcoholic who cannot hold a job, he is perpetually at odds with his surroundings and with his traditionalist father, though he remains Boughton’s most beloved child. Brilliant, lovable, and wayward, Jack forges an intense bond with Glory and engages painfully with Ames, his godfather and namesake. Home is a moving and healing book about families, family secrets, and the passing of the generations, about love and death and faith. It is Robinson’s greatest work, an unforgettable embodiment of the deepest and most universal emotions.
Average Rating: 
Review: 2009-01-08
Beautiful, like another taste of Gilead I relished the reading of this book. The language and the story are unhurried, lyrical, and deep. The handcrafting of the prose is wonderful. This novel is set in a slow 1950's summer in Gilead, the small Iowa town that is the setting for the Robinson's Pulitzer Prize winning novel that takes it's name from the town. The time frame of Home is concurrent with Gilead and the characters are the same. Gilead focuses on the family of the aged Congregational Reverend Ames. Home focuses on the family of Ames lifelong best friend, Presbyterian Reverend Boughton.
I appreciated this novel for many of the same reasons that I appreciated Gilead. The pace is unhurried and the quiet summer allows the characters to reflect deeply on their own lives. While the pace and action is gentle, this novel goes deeply and unflinchingly into topics on periphery of many of our own lives. Religious faith and skepticism in the same close family. Mid life crises that come to grips with the fallout from regrettable long past decisions and impending deaths of parents. Home deals with these tough topics that we all face in our own lives but it somehow leaves me using the word `Beautiful' to describe this novel. I'm sorry that I'm done reading it because I wanted it to go on, maybe because a slow summer in Gilead is so unlike my own rushed life of hi tech engineering and three small children. I could use a summer in Gilead in my own life.
Review: 2009-01-04
Gilead revisited All the sons and daughters of the Rev. Boughton dutifully return home to Gilead for Thanksgiving and Christmas, submit to the family traditions, and then quickly leave again to pursue their own lives. All but one: Jack, the prodigal son, has not been heard from in twenty years. When he suddenly turns up in Gilead, he is surrounded by mystery: Where has he been all these years? What has he been doing? Why is he coming back now?
His ailing, widowed father, whose patience and forbearance seem almost saintly, does not question him. His sister Glory, who has come home after a failed relationship, regards him warily. To these two damaged siblings, home is a refuge, but not a comfort.
Gifted. charming, reclusive Jack meets his father's attempts at reconciliation with polite evasiveness. It falls to Glory to gradually draw him out, to slowly win his trust. Her own predicament - she has been deceived and abandoned by the man she loved - serves as a distorted reflection of Jack's misdeeds, and he begins to confide in her.
He makes a brave attempt at overcoming his skepticism, but his father's certainties, the "Presbyterian probity and rectitude", get in the way. Buried resentments and old grief come bubbling to the surface. Jack chafes at his father's futile attempts to start a "conversation" with him. Called upon to say Grace before a meal or to play a hymn on the piano, he feels that he is on trial, that his performance is being scrutinized and graded. There are probing questions concerning Presbyterian theology: predestination, "election", forgiveness, damnation; God's judgment and God's grace. With his old friend, the Rev. Ames, Boughton engages in heated arguments about theological dogma and politics. Jack wonders how dogma can be reconciled with Scripture, and how the accident of birth affects destiny - but the answers he receives do not satisfy him. Lila Ames' simple belief in salvation carries more conviction than the high-flown arguments of the learned men.
This domestic struggle proceeds against the background of 1950s political and social upheaval: the Civil Rights movement, the brinkmanship of John Foster Dulles ("that nice Presbyterian gentleman"), the beginning of the Cold War, the threat of the atom bomb; and, of course, the theology of Karl Barth.
The parochialism of the town is evident: other denominations are eyed with suspicion. The Rev. Boughton has been "abroad" only once: to Minnesota, where to his consternation he found a lot of Lutherans. Anglicans are viewed with outright animosity.
There are no "colored" people in Gilead. Boughton dismisses the first stirrings of the Civil Rights struggle as a temporary problem.
The full extent of Jack's predicament is not revealed until the very end of the novel, and the outcome is uncertain.
Some situations in this story seem to me somewhat contrived - quite obviously set up to make a specific point. I did not have that problem with "GILEAD". Still, despite occasional rumblings of discontent, I found "HOME" an extraordinarily rich and rewarding novel.
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Amazon List Price: $25.00
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