Gilead (novel)

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**Gilead**
Author	Marilynne Robinson
Country	United States
Language	English
Publisher
Released	2004

Gilead is a novel written by Marilynne Robinson and published in 2004. It won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award. The book is the fictional autobiography of the Reverend John Ames, an elderly congregationalist pastor in the small, out of the way town of Gilead, Iowa who knows that he is dying of a heart condition. At the beginning of the book, the date is established as 1956, and Ames explains that he is writing an account of his life for his 7-year-old son, who will have few memories of him as an adult. According to Robinson, the fictional town of Gilead is based on the real town of Tabor, Iowa, located in the southwest corner of the state and well-known for his importance in the abolition movement. Likewise, the character of the narrator's grandfather is loosely based on the real life story of Rev. John Todd, a congregationalist minister from Tabor who was a conductor on the Underground Railroad, and an accomplice of the abolitionist John Brown in illegal acts before the American Civil War.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The book interweaves accounts of the lives of Ames, his father and (especially) his grandfather, both of them pastors in their turn, as well as that of his godson John Ames Boughton, and the life of the town in general. Ames and his father have been Christian pacifists, but his grandfather was a radical abolitionist who carried out guerilla actions with John Brown before the American Civil War, served as a chaplain with the Union forces in that war, and incited his congregation to join up and serve in it; as Ames remarks, "He preached this town into the war". In the course of the story, it quickly emerges that Ames's first wife, Louisa, died in childbirth and his daughter soon after. Ames endured long years of loneliness until his second wife Lila, an uneducated woman, appeared in the town, sought out the church, and eventually persuaded Ames to marry her - thus releasing him from the obligation to hide the passion for her that he has felt almost since her first appearance. As Ames writes, John Ames Boughton (whose father is the local Presbyterian minister and Ames's lifelong friend) reappears in the town after leaving it in great disgrace following his seduction and abandonment of a girl from a poverty-stricken family near his university. The daughter of this relationship died when she was three years old despite the efforts of the Boughton family to look after her. Young Boughton, the apple of his parents' eye but deeply disliked by Ames, seeks Ames out; much of the tension in the story results from Ames's mistrust of young Boughton and particularly of his relationship with Lila and their son. In the dénouement, however, it turns out that Boughton is himself suffering from his forced separation from his own common-law wife and son, who are blacks from Missouri; the family are not allowed to live together because of segregationist laws, and her family utterly reject Boughton. His understanding with Lila lies, perhaps, in their common sense of tragedy as she prepares for the death of Ames, who has given her a security and stability she has never known before.

Although there is action in the story, its mainspring lies in Ames's theological struggles on a whole series of fronts: with his grandfather's engagement in the Civil War, with his own loneliness through much of his life, with his brother's clear and his father's apparent loss of belief, with his father's desertion of the town, with the hardships of people's lives, and above all with his feelings of hostility and jealousy towards Boughton, whom he knows at some level he has to forgive. The book is full of quotations from the bible, from theologians especially Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion, and from philosophers, especially the atheist Feuerbach whom Ames greatly respects. It is remarkable that this kind of content should create such an absorbing novel and one that has achieved such acclaim from a secular audience. Perhaps the key to the book's success is the deeply sympathetic character of Ames, who writes from a position of serenity despite suffering while always remaining conscious of his limitations and failings. In the closing pages of the book he learns of Boughton's true situation, and is able to offer him the genuine affection and forgiveness he has never before been able to feel for him. Although it is not stated, it is left as a lingering possibility that he dies in his sleep or at his prayers the next night.