John Ames recalls his childhood impression of his grandfather, a man who seemed: Ames’s grandfather was one of those who sheltered John Brown and his followers, and who took up arms himself. Ames’s grandfather, minister in Gilead in those days, became deeply involved in the abolitionist cause whose great leader was John Brown, given sanctuary and support many times in Iowa during the armed, insurrectionist campaign for abolition that was a harbinger of the civil war. The state became a crucial destination for runaway slaves being moved out along the underground railroad to freedom in the North. Woven into Ames’s diary of current happenings in Gilead – ‘the kind of town where dogs slept in the road’ – is the story he tells his son of how, before the Civil War, Iowa was a frontier free state, settled both by abolitionists and those who fought to preserve slavery. Ames has experienced intense loneliness, while his relationship with Jack has soured as a consequence of the younger man’s past indiscretion, his abandonment of his father and family for twenty years, and by Jack’s religious doubts. Now Jack has come home to Gilead to visit his dying father, and Ames is troubled by the resentment he feels toward the younger man: the trail of damage he left behind when he walked out of Gilead, and the jealousy he feels as Jack becomes friendly with Lila. Alongside, he documents his strained relationship with Jack Boughton, the son of his best friend, given Ames’s name as a baby, and regarded almost as a surrogate child, a compensation for the loss of his own first wife and daughter. In each daily epistle he recounts stories from the past – of his father and grandfather, both of them also ministers of the church. He married to a much younger second wife, Lila, who has borne him a son, now seven years. Ames is in his seventies, and his heart is failing. In Gilead, it’s 1956 and John Ames, a Congregationalist minister of the eponymous community in Iowa, is writing a journal for his young son to read after his death. The novels are set in the quiet and conservative rural America of the early 1950s, yet there’s an undertow of a country divided by race and prejudice.
Collectively, in an undemonstrative fashion, they constitute an interrogation of America as a home, and of the obligations of religious belief in a society in which social justice and the care of others is not guaranteed for all. I don’t think I have read a finer suite of novels. Recently, I read the Marilynne Robinson trilogy that begins with Gilead (2004), continues with Home (2008) and concludes with Lila (2014).
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