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MARILYNNE ROBINSON'S "HOME"

"Home. What kinder place could there be on earth, and why did it seem to them all like exile?" For the melancholic characters of Marilynne Robinson's new novel, home is both comfortable and haunted, filled with old promises and fresh resignation. Like tattered moths, the children of Reverend Robert Boughton have returned to Iowa, where they brood, console and grapple for some kind of grace.

With this book, Ms Robinson has returned to the dusty, religious town of Gilead, the site of her eponymous, Pulitzer-prize winning novel of 2005. Readers could be forgiven for being shocked by the speed of this follow-up, given the 23-year pause between her first and second books. But it is clear that the author of "Home" was far too attached to these rich characters to let them go. We are lucky for it.

Back among the front porches, fragrant kitchens and Sunday sermons of Gilead in the 1950s, Ms Robinson turns her attention away from Reverend John Ames, whose meditative letters beautifully filled the earlier book, and towards the household of his close friend, Reverend Boughton. "Home" is delivered in the third-person from Glory, a lonesome, 38-year-old English teacher, who has returned to nurse her ailing father and rue the "gradual catastrophe of her own venture into the world." The man who wooed her with hundreds of letters and promises of marriage has left her high and dry. "What have I done with my life?" she asks. "It is as if I had a dream of adult life and woke up from it, still here in my parents' house." 

Glory is our guide through the claustrophobic tenderness of the Boughton home, but the story is not hers. It is her brother Jack's, the gaunt, scrappy, charismatic ne'er-do-well who so irked Ames in "Gilead". Having left home in disgrace decades before, he has returned defeated, whittled down by life, vulnerable yet still striking. A man "at once indecipherable and transparent." Their father, made small and frail with time, is overwhelmed by Jack's bewildering return. Fitting for an author so moved by faith, Ms Robinson has written the story of the prodigal son.

This impressive, atmospheric book is very much unlike Ms Robinson's earlier work. If "Gilead" was all about reflected experience--about the wilful refinement of thoughts into wisdom--"Home" is a series of moments, full of action and dialogue, punchy and tense. It is about the inevitable losses of time--the hopes quashed, the strengths weakened. ("Jesus never had to be old", complains a feeble Reverend Boughton.) But also the unmistakeable pleasures of this world, such as the "rattle and pop" of a newly restored DeSoto on gravel, or the dark companionable laughter shared with a brother. In writing about the "intimacy of the ordinary", Ms Robinson elevates it to anything but. 

"Home" is published by Virago (UK) and Farrar, Straus and Giroux (US) 

Picture credit: Todd Ehlers/flickr

(Emily Bobrow is the editor of moreintelligentlife.com and a New York arts correspondent for The Economist. Her profile of Marilynne Robinson ran in the autumn issue of Intelligent Life magazine.)