Marilynne Robinson, _Lila_

 FUNNY THING, MY experience with this one developed along exactly the same lines as had my experience of its predecessor, Home. I was looking forward to it, but bogged down and laid it aside before hitting the 100-page mark. Then, with the news that a new Robinson novel was imminent, I picked it up, stuck with it, and ended up finding it moving and memorable.

Lila, like Home, shares its setting and characters with Gilead. Lila is the much younger wife of the Rev. John Ames, narrator of Gilead, which is cast as a long letter to his and Lila’s son, whose maturity Ames fears he will not live to see. As Home was mainly free indirect discourse from the point of view of Glory Boughton, daughter of Ames’s best friend and fellow clergyman, Lila is mainly free indirect discourse from the point of view of Lila.

Lila has had a harder time than Glory Boughton—not that being the unmarried daughter of a Presbyterian minister in small-town Iowa in the Eisenhower era was a bed of roses, by any means. Lila’s is a grim story, though. Abandoned by her family for reasons unknown, the child Lila is taken up by Doll, one of a small group of itinerant agricultural workers, a band of outsiders who have become each other’s chosen family. They get by for a while, but eventually the rigors of the Depression disintegrate the group, and Doll gets in bad trouble for attacking (maybe killing?) a member of Lila’s family of origin. 

The by-now-teenaged Lila lands in a St. Louis brothel. Relatively plain and constitutionally unable to pretend she is having a better time than she is, she does not prove a hit with the clientele. For a time she makes herself useful in other ways, then just hits the road, catching a bus for as far as her limited funds will take her, ending up in an abandoned shack on the outskirts of Gilead, Iowa.

And somehow she meets Ames. And they fall in love. Not very swoonily, or even very becomingly as far as the town of Gilead is concerned, but le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait pas, as Pascal put it. The real presiding genius here, though, may be another French Christian theologian, since Robinson is a great admirer of John Calvin. By the end, we seem to watching the mysterious operations of grace. It’s not clear whether Ames is saving Lila or Lila is saving Ames, but their marriage makes no sense at all while also being the best thing that ever happened to them.