In Freelance Christianity, our last Featured Book, writer Vance Morgan offered a shout-out to another author and her book: Gilead, “Marilynne Robinson’s beautiful and Pulitzer Prize-winning novel…is as close to perfect as any book I have read.” In a subsequent posting, he references Aaron’s famous blessing from Numbers [“The Lord bless you and keep you…”], then avows, “Gilead has been that sort of blessing to me, more than any book I have ever read.”
Issued in 2004, the book’s publisher describes it as “the vision of life as a wondrously strange creation.” It is a 247-page love letter that the aged clergyman John Ames writes to his unfledged son, hoping “when you are an old man like I am, you might think of writing some sort of account of yourself, as I am doing.” Why? Because, “[i]n every important way we are such secrets from each other….”
Think of it as being what its publisher calls “a hymn of praise and lamentation to the God-haunted existence” of the protagonist. Morgan affirms a reviewer who found Gilead “so serenely beautiful, and written in a prose so gravely measured and thoughtful, that one feels touched with grace just to read it.”
Gilead
By Marilynne Robinson
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004