Gilead

GILEAD
by Marilynne Robinson

Awards: National Book Critics Circle Winner 2004, Pulitzer Winner 2005

 Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2006, LA Times Finalist 2004, NY Times Finalist 2004, Oprah Book Club 2021, PEN/Faulkner Finalist 2005, Women's Prize Longlist 2006

 Dates Read: December 24, 2006 & June 3, 2017

 Gilead is an exquisite novel of tenderness and love and such a lovely breath of fresh air from war, conflict and mayhem. 

The narrator, John Ames, is a 76 year old preacher who has lived his life in Gilead, Iowa and is writing a letter to his 7-year-old son because his health is failing. Ames' legacy to his son is through this letter, an accounting of himself to a very young son who will never truly know his aging father. Throughout this account, Ames assesses himself and his life, inside and out. The novel is slow and deliberate, asking the reader to take the pace of an old man in Gilead in 1956 which allows the reader to make the acquaintance of Ames' father and grandfather, estranged over his grandfather's departure for Kansas to march for abolition which results in his father's pacifism.

The other constant in the book is Ames' friendship since childhood with "old Boughton," a Presbyterian minister. Boughton, father of many children, favors his son, named John "Jack" Ames Boughton, above all others. Jack is a ne'er-do-well. Ames knows it and strives to love him as he knows he should. Jack arrives in Gilead after a long absence, full of charm and mischief. These are the things that Ames shares with his son: his ancestors, the nature of love and friendship, the part that faith and prayer play in every life and an awareness of one's own culpability.

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