Two and a half books to recommend.  Gilead and Lost Memory of Skin are yeses, and Home is a maybe.

Why did I wait so long to read Gilead?  I think it’s because Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel seemed on the surface something that would not appeal to me.  Letters from an elderly pastor to the young son he knows will not have him much longer?  Iowa in the 50s?

I should have jumped right in to this beautifully written book.  Try this: “There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality.” (p. 238)

One of many truths expressed through the letters John Ames penned for Robby.

Robinson’s more recent book Home is set at the same time and place (fictional Gilead, Iowa) but looks at some of the same events from the perspective of members of the family of Ames’ best friend, another elderly (retired) pastor nearing the end of his life.

Glory and Jack Boughton return to Gilead, each with separate sorrows, to care for their father.  While not as well paced and cleanly rendered as Gilead, it is a profoundly sad story.  Families are complex because people are.

Here’s a paragraph that touched me particularly:  “Jack said, ‘I think hope is the worst thing in the world.  I really do.  It makes a fool of you while it lasts.  And then when it’s gone, it’s like there’s nothing left of you at all.  Except’—he shrugged and laughed—‘except what you can’t be rid of.” (p.275).

I’m afraid it’s true:  hope held close and long but unfilled often makes us feel foolish.

For another book with a totally different tone and topic but a high degree of insight and craft, take a look at Russell Banks’ novel Lost Memory of Skin.  The subject sounds unsavory – a convicted sex offender living with a group of similarly ostracized men under a South Florida causeway meets a professor who wants to study the younger man’s life.

Banks deftly develops evocative characters and weaves their psychologies into the social fabric of the world we share in an original way.  There’s a lot of think about as the story unfolds, but the book is also something of a page-turner.