pileofgreybooks: a book ring

First of all, I want to thank Tom and Jess for inviting me to join this book ring. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson won the Pulitzer this year and is really worth reading, a novel that starts out deceptively simply and turns out to be very hard to pin down or to wrap your head around. It's told in the first person by an elderly Midewestern preacher approaching death and writing a letter to his young son, ostensibly to offer him worldly wisdom. The subjects covered include several generations in the life of the family, a family in which fathers and sons have all been preachers. The action travels back as far as the "Bloody Kansas" days leading up to the Civil War. At first, the narrator's tone seems downright treacly and, indeed, preachy and there are platitudes every other paragraph. Slowly, though, one realizes that Robinson is up to something: the preacher's certainty is breaking down and he may have been deceiving himself about a lot of things in his life. The book continually surprises the reader and, after the first 60 pages or so, really picks up. This is a book that is set among people for whom religion is woven into the fabric of life and Bibical narratives (especially those of the patriarchs and the parable of the pordigal son) are woven into the language of the book. The subject is religion, but approached in an incredibly sophisticated, challenging way. It asks whether devotion to religion can be squared with being a fully engaged, thinking, ethical human being and it doesn't provide easy answers. It has a tircky narrative structure that asks whether true wisdom can indeed be realted through sermons or indeed words at all. Despite it's short length, this is a very sophisticated and intricate novel -- the Pulitzer committee did a good job!