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It often feels as if the contemporary literary scene has internalized Anna Karenina’s dictum on the nature of happiness—that it is not idiosyncratic, with the implication that it is not worth the kind of careful attention that literature applies to its subjects. We need look no further than our own lives to recognize the problem we’ll encounter if we preoccupy ourselves with the Tolstoyan “unhappy family�� at the expense of the happy ones. Asked about our defining or most enlightening moments, most of us are as likely to recount happy memories as we are moments of despair. Yet too often, contemporary literature ignores this. Authors able to give the lie to Tolstoy by rendering joy as a complex substance are few and far between: think Ron Carlson, Laurie Colwin, Ellen Gilchrist, Richard Russo.

In this context, Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead comes not just as a breath of fresh air, but as a ray of light, quietly penetrating to the heart of mysteries regarding joy and love, life and death. Because it’s written as a series of missives from the aged narrator to his young son, meant not to be read until long after the narrator’s death, Gilead is largely plotless—a conflict of sorts between the narrator and a friend’s child does eventually develop, but it is a quiet conflict, and one that doesn’t become clear until nearly halfway through the novel. The narrative is never as important as the meditations that surround it.

This is a novel that celebrates life, that variegated communion between inner and outer worlds, between ego and experience. But Robinson is also concerned with death, not only as the inevitable end of that communion but also as its thematic counterpoint. If Robinson’s territory here is the spiritual life of one man in particular, her thematic concern is how we in general can face the ends of our lives without despair or resort to existential reframings of the problem—how we can face the prospect of death, in fact, with quiet gratitude and even joy. Robinson’s portrayal of religion is especially deft; instead of opiate or panacea, her narrator’s Christianity serves as a lens, providing a stasis and a vocabulary through which the novel can wrestle with its concerns.

Ultimately, the quiet conclusions that Gilead seems to favor—that the experience of existence is one that we should treasure as a gift, that we too often lose sight of the immense beauty of the world amidst our quotidian bustle, that love and charity have the power to remake lives—are neither religious nor secular. Rather, they are humanist; they all concern a belief in the fundamental dignity of human lives. Is it melodramatic to say that these are the kind of quiet encouragements that we could usefully carry in our minds into the shadows of our own personal Gethsemanes? Regardless, Gilead offers us, in its portrait of a long life reflected upon with some degree of contentment, a reminder of just how deep, enthralling, and abidingly strange happiness can be.

Perhaps the problem is not that happiness is not idiosyncratic enough to be worth investigating. The problem may be instead that happiness is simply too big for most writers to write convincingly about, that perhaps joy, like God, is too capacious to fully describe. Yet here is the rare novel that suggests insights into the natures of both.