Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

This book first came to my attention as an Amazon recommendation. I recognized it from the Barnes and Noble table that has the Oprah-esque trade paperbacks I usually enjoy. The Haftorah for my bat mitvah was about the city of Gilead, so I thought I might also have a connection to the book that way. Unfortunately, it’s probably my least favorite book in a long time.

Gilead is a novel written as a series of letters (or maybe one long letter) from a minister to his son, when the father finds out that he is dying. It is set in Iowa in the 1950's. The letter format is a device the author uses to enable the narrator to tell his life story; unfortunately for the book it is not believable that this man’s secrets and concerns would go into a letter to his son.

The first third of the book goes through the minister's life story slowly, weaving his family's stories with mundane events taking place in the present. I enjoyed this part of the book, expecting that it was properly preparing the reader for what he’d face later in life. Many of the stories were charming and some of them captured charaters with incredible detail.

"Once we baptized a litter of cats. They were dusty little barn cats just steady on their legs, the kind of waifish creatures that live their anonymouse lives keeping the mice down and have no interest in humans at all, except to avoid them. But the animals all seem to start out sociable, so we were always pleased to find new kittens prowling out of whatever cranny their mother had tried to hide them in, as ready to play we we were. It occurred to one of the girls to swaddle them up in a doll's dress--there was only one dress, which was just as well since the cats could hardly tolerate a moment in it and would have to have been unswaddled as soon as they were christened in any case. I myself moistened their brow, repeating the full Trinitarian formula."

However, at about the third-mark, the narrator begins to hint at bad feelings he has towards his best friend’s grown son, Jack. The focus of the plot in the remainder of the book is foreshadowing the events Jack is involved in and finally telling his son (and the reader) what they are. While the actual story about Jack was compelling and surprising and everything you’d want it to be, its placement in a letter someone else was writing was not well done. And the supposed suspense around what it was, the supposed hesitancy the narrator had about telling his son the story, did not achieve anything.

This is the second book in a row that I’ve commented had the reader wondering about some future bad thing that was going to happen through most of the book. In both cases, the focus the author put on this anticipation and buildup was not enjoyable to read. It’s not a fundamentally flawed style, for example, God of Small Things does this quite effectively. But particularly in Gilead it had me impatient, not engaged.

One thing I did like about the book was the actual narrator. He comes across as a humble, pleasant, kind man. Though fictional, he restored a little faith in me that in fact there is a way for religion to be a completely positive force in the world. He reminds me of a minister I once met on a plane to Kansas. That said, the book was hardly worth the read just for the narrator.