The Elemental Aspects of Existence
Marilynne Robinson, Lila
Little, Brown, 272pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781844088805
reviewed by Rachel Sykes
To a growing and often fanatical readership, Marilynne Summers Robinson is unrivalled as a writer of American prose. The author first rose to prominence when her second novel, Gilead, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2005, and by the time President Obama awarded her the National Humanities Medal in 2010 Robinson was literary fiction’s worst kept secret, wildly popular amongst book groups, journalists, literary critics and, indeed, the President.
'I feel like I know y’all,' Obama told the gathered recipients, 'Because I’ve enjoyed your performances. Your writings have changed me – I think for the better. And Marilynne,' he added to Robinson, 'I believe that.'
Despite her recent success, Robinson’s reputation has been slow won. Her debut novel, Housekeeping, was published in 1980, written in fragments whilst her two young children were asleep and during breaks from a PhD on Shakespeare’s history plays. The result is a strange, melancholy and deeply transcendental book. The story of Ruthie and Lucille Stone and the succession of female relatives who come to raise them in rural Idaho, Housekeeping explores themes of transience and impermanence, including but not limited to the gendered construction of frontier narratives, the history of regionalism in the American Midwest, and the idea of what we now call 'wilderness'.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Robinson’s love of the spiritual, the transient and the transcendent is most often described as old-fashioned. Gilead was published some 24 years after the success of Housekeeping, when Robinson was 61 years old. Told from the perspective of the Reverend John Ames who, at the age of 67, learns that he is about to die, Gilead is a reflective, religious but frequently celebratory epistle on the joys of parenthood, the failures of pacifism in the once 'radical' Midwest, and the slowly drawn pleasures that make up the life of an introvert. Home, a 'partner novel' to Gilead, followed swiftly in 2008, shedding light on the household of Ames’s oldest friend, the Reverend Boughton, his wayward son, Jack, and neglected daughter, Glory, all characters who appear at the periphery of Gilead but who, in Home, take centre stage.
Similarly, Robinson’s latest novel, Lila, turns our attention to Lila Ames, who wanders into Gilead in search of work and soon becomes Ames’s second wife. In Gilead, Lila is a mysterious, much loved, but ultimately marginal figure: through Ames’ first-person narration, we learn very little about her, except that she is almost half the preacher’s age and unaccustomed to the minutiae of parish life. She rarely speaks, has no job, friends, or family of her own, and is named only once by the disgraced Jack Boughton whom Ames believes is trying to seduce her.
By comparison, Lila employs a closely focalised third-person and Robinson records events as only Lila sees them. Narrative episodes overlap, frequently, with the timeline of Gilead and significant moments in the life of Ames and Lila are repeated from the perspective of the latter. The experience of reading Gilead and Lila is therefore disarmingly different and most keenly represented by the intimacies that Lila and Ames share. The moment in which the two become engaged, for instance, is a great relief and a surprise for the elderly Reverend in Gilead. Until that point, Ames says, he barely hoped that this strange woman could love him and, when he discovers that she does, his heart swells and quickly calms. The event is brief, for Ames, and purely celebratory: a reward for his long years of study and seclusion and the culmination of a lifetime’s loneliness.
Told by Lila, however, the scene is nauseatingly uncomfortable. What for Ames unfolds in a luscious garden, overflowing with roses and symbolism, for Lila occurs on a dry and dusty path. 'You ought to marry me,' she stutters, before retreating to the other side of the road: 'the flush of anger and shame so hot in her that this time surely she could not go on living.' After several days apart, a period that the Reverend does not recount at all, Ames arrives at Lila’s cabin with a pendant that once belonged to his mother and performs a baptism which, when told from Lila’s perspective, is the most erotic moment that Robinson may ever have written. Finally, through Lila’s caveats and protestations, with a dying catfish as witness at the side of the road, they are engaged.
Robinson’s talent as a novelist is not to invent, in this instance, but rather to recycle. Through Lila’s perspective, the story of their engagement gains a vulnerability that Ames, despite his ailing health, cannot evoke. Similarly, Lila’s personal history far predates her marriage to the Reverend but it is the presentation and integration of this history within the context of the Gilead 'trilogy' that demonstrates Robinson’s skill for point-of-view narration.
Lila begins roughly 30 years before Gilead and skips back and forth between the protagonist’s childhood, her early adulthood in a St. Louis whorehouse, and her eventual marriage to Ames. On the opening page, the eponymous child is sat on a stoop, neglected, hungry and covered in scratches, but by the page’s end Lila is rescued, or stolen, by the enigmatic Doll who commits them both to a life of wandering to escape Lila’s family and Doll’s mysterious criminal past. Doll even gives her a name, Lila, in the hope that a pretty name will make her turn out prettier than the life she is born into.
The novel then turns to themes that Robinson last visited in Housekeeping, specifically the idea that drifting can be a form of female loneliness, liberation, and latent self-expression. At the end of Housekeeping, the novel’s characters abandon their home for a life of travelling, moving from town to town to avoid the authorities who would tie them to one place. Lila, however, narrates the opposite transition. It is the story of a transient girl and her attempts to settle, but it is also about the very concept of home, the move from a life in the 'wilderness' to a life in Gilead, and the revolutionary act of naming.
Lila’s nameless origin is key here: to be born with both forename and surname, to know from whom and where you come, is a privilege that itinerant labourers, like Lila and Doll, are not afforded. Whilst generations of Ames and Boughtons live and die in Gilead, Lila and Doll invent their own names, make their own families, and have no home to speak of. Most importantly, to a writer like Robinson, and in a novel like Lila, neither Lila nor Doll feel the lack of these conventions until they return to civilisation. Doll gives Lila her first name, but a schoolteacher mishears them, inventing a surname, Dahl, and adding an origin story, 'You’re Norwegian!', that Lila claims she never knew she lacked. 'That was the first time she ever thought about names,' Robinson writes. 'Turns out she was missing one all that time and hadn’t even noticed.'
Robinson specialises in making the reader rethink these very elemental aspects of existence, reconceiving experience as a web of symbols and constructs through which the beautiful ordinariness of the world can sometimes shine through. There is a sense, then, in which Lila is an echo of a story that has been told twice before, but as Robinson revisits the same Iowan town, through the religious lives, introverted characters, and paradigms of domesticity that are constant in her work, she creates a stand-alone novel that plays out her fascination with spirituality, goodness and the overwhelming nature of loneliness in new and richly emotive ways.
'I feel like I know y’all,' Obama told the gathered recipients, 'Because I’ve enjoyed your performances. Your writings have changed me – I think for the better. And Marilynne,' he added to Robinson, 'I believe that.'
Despite her recent success, Robinson’s reputation has been slow won. Her debut novel, Housekeeping, was published in 1980, written in fragments whilst her two young children were asleep and during breaks from a PhD on Shakespeare’s history plays. The result is a strange, melancholy and deeply transcendental book. The story of Ruthie and Lucille Stone and the succession of female relatives who come to raise them in rural Idaho, Housekeeping explores themes of transience and impermanence, including but not limited to the gendered construction of frontier narratives, the history of regionalism in the American Midwest, and the idea of what we now call 'wilderness'.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Robinson’s love of the spiritual, the transient and the transcendent is most often described as old-fashioned. Gilead was published some 24 years after the success of Housekeeping, when Robinson was 61 years old. Told from the perspective of the Reverend John Ames who, at the age of 67, learns that he is about to die, Gilead is a reflective, religious but frequently celebratory epistle on the joys of parenthood, the failures of pacifism in the once 'radical' Midwest, and the slowly drawn pleasures that make up the life of an introvert. Home, a 'partner novel' to Gilead, followed swiftly in 2008, shedding light on the household of Ames’s oldest friend, the Reverend Boughton, his wayward son, Jack, and neglected daughter, Glory, all characters who appear at the periphery of Gilead but who, in Home, take centre stage.
Similarly, Robinson’s latest novel, Lila, turns our attention to Lila Ames, who wanders into Gilead in search of work and soon becomes Ames’s second wife. In Gilead, Lila is a mysterious, much loved, but ultimately marginal figure: through Ames’ first-person narration, we learn very little about her, except that she is almost half the preacher’s age and unaccustomed to the minutiae of parish life. She rarely speaks, has no job, friends, or family of her own, and is named only once by the disgraced Jack Boughton whom Ames believes is trying to seduce her.
By comparison, Lila employs a closely focalised third-person and Robinson records events as only Lila sees them. Narrative episodes overlap, frequently, with the timeline of Gilead and significant moments in the life of Ames and Lila are repeated from the perspective of the latter. The experience of reading Gilead and Lila is therefore disarmingly different and most keenly represented by the intimacies that Lila and Ames share. The moment in which the two become engaged, for instance, is a great relief and a surprise for the elderly Reverend in Gilead. Until that point, Ames says, he barely hoped that this strange woman could love him and, when he discovers that she does, his heart swells and quickly calms. The event is brief, for Ames, and purely celebratory: a reward for his long years of study and seclusion and the culmination of a lifetime’s loneliness.
Told by Lila, however, the scene is nauseatingly uncomfortable. What for Ames unfolds in a luscious garden, overflowing with roses and symbolism, for Lila occurs on a dry and dusty path. 'You ought to marry me,' she stutters, before retreating to the other side of the road: 'the flush of anger and shame so hot in her that this time surely she could not go on living.' After several days apart, a period that the Reverend does not recount at all, Ames arrives at Lila’s cabin with a pendant that once belonged to his mother and performs a baptism which, when told from Lila’s perspective, is the most erotic moment that Robinson may ever have written. Finally, through Lila’s caveats and protestations, with a dying catfish as witness at the side of the road, they are engaged.
Robinson’s talent as a novelist is not to invent, in this instance, but rather to recycle. Through Lila’s perspective, the story of their engagement gains a vulnerability that Ames, despite his ailing health, cannot evoke. Similarly, Lila’s personal history far predates her marriage to the Reverend but it is the presentation and integration of this history within the context of the Gilead 'trilogy' that demonstrates Robinson’s skill for point-of-view narration.
Lila begins roughly 30 years before Gilead and skips back and forth between the protagonist’s childhood, her early adulthood in a St. Louis whorehouse, and her eventual marriage to Ames. On the opening page, the eponymous child is sat on a stoop, neglected, hungry and covered in scratches, but by the page’s end Lila is rescued, or stolen, by the enigmatic Doll who commits them both to a life of wandering to escape Lila’s family and Doll’s mysterious criminal past. Doll even gives her a name, Lila, in the hope that a pretty name will make her turn out prettier than the life she is born into.
The novel then turns to themes that Robinson last visited in Housekeeping, specifically the idea that drifting can be a form of female loneliness, liberation, and latent self-expression. At the end of Housekeeping, the novel’s characters abandon their home for a life of travelling, moving from town to town to avoid the authorities who would tie them to one place. Lila, however, narrates the opposite transition. It is the story of a transient girl and her attempts to settle, but it is also about the very concept of home, the move from a life in the 'wilderness' to a life in Gilead, and the revolutionary act of naming.
Lila’s nameless origin is key here: to be born with both forename and surname, to know from whom and where you come, is a privilege that itinerant labourers, like Lila and Doll, are not afforded. Whilst generations of Ames and Boughtons live and die in Gilead, Lila and Doll invent their own names, make their own families, and have no home to speak of. Most importantly, to a writer like Robinson, and in a novel like Lila, neither Lila nor Doll feel the lack of these conventions until they return to civilisation. Doll gives Lila her first name, but a schoolteacher mishears them, inventing a surname, Dahl, and adding an origin story, 'You’re Norwegian!', that Lila claims she never knew she lacked. 'That was the first time she ever thought about names,' Robinson writes. 'Turns out she was missing one all that time and hadn’t even noticed.'
Robinson specialises in making the reader rethink these very elemental aspects of existence, reconceiving experience as a web of symbols and constructs through which the beautiful ordinariness of the world can sometimes shine through. There is a sense, then, in which Lila is an echo of a story that has been told twice before, but as Robinson revisits the same Iowan town, through the religious lives, introverted characters, and paradigms of domesticity that are constant in her work, she creates a stand-alone novel that plays out her fascination with spirituality, goodness and the overwhelming nature of loneliness in new and richly emotive ways.