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A beautiful book of great wisdom and tenderness. Melancholy, but hopeful. It well-deserved the Pulitzer for Fiction in 2005, and surprisingly Marilynne's second book written 24 years after her first, Housekeeping (which I have also reviewed here on GR).
In Gilead, Iowa, Rev John Ames is a 76yo preacher married to a much younger woman with whom he has a 7yo son. The time is the 50s and Rev writes this book to his son regretting that he will soon be dead while his son is still a child, so he wanted to leave something concrete about himself for his son to read when he is older. So, the book talks about Rev Ames relationships to his own father and grandfather (both also parsons) who are both long since passed away, as well as other anecdotes about how he met his wife and some of the philosophical and spiritual questions with which he struggles.
In these musings, he speaks of his grandfather who lost an eye in the Civil War and fled Iowa at one point across the border into Kansas. When Ames is a boy, he and his father seek out the tomb of the grandfather and this adventure marks the boy forever. They find the grave and tidy it up and and as they finish they "saw a full moon rising just as the sun was going down. Each of them was standing on its edge, with the most wonderful light between them. It seemed as if you could touch it, as if there were palpable currents of light passing back and forth, or as if there were great taut skeins of light suspended between them." (P. 16) Ames memories of his grandfather are "like a man everlastingly struck by lightning, so that there was an ashiness about his clothes and his hair never settled and his eye had a look of tragic alarm when he wasn't actually sleeping." (P. 57) This symbol of ash also appears when the original church of Ames' father burns down and the folks of the village are rummaging through the remains as rain breaks out. Times being quite poor due to the Depression, his father shelters himself with Ames under a wagon and they share an ash-flavored biscuit that the father had in his jacket pocket, "it was truly the bread of affliction, because everyone wad poor then." (P. 117)
Ames loves his son and dotes on him but feels an immense gulf of age between them. His descriptions of the boy and his mother playing are priceless like this one: "There's a shimmer on a child's hair, in the sunlight. There are rainbow colors in it, tiny beams of just the same colors you can see in the dew sometimes." (P. 60) Or, "You appear to be altogether happy. I remember those first experiments with fundamental things, gravity and light, and what an absolute pleasure they were. And there is your mother. 'Don't go so high,' she says. You'll mind. You're a good fellow." (P.127)
On of the themes that the latter part of the book focuses on increasingly towards the end is the rather ambiguous character, John Ames "Jack" Boughton, the son of Ames' best friend, Rev Boughton, who Ames had baptized as a baby. Jack spends a lot of time with Ames's wife and son and has some theological arguments with Ames. For a while, he is portrayed kind of like Ivan Karamazov, the eternal doubter and manipulator, and I even thought he might have aims on the Rev's family should he pass away. Without giving away any spoilers, let us just say that Robison masterfully portrays this character as astonishingly human.
In summary, it is an extraordinary book and deserves to be read again and again. I'll close with this beautiful passage from towards the end of the book which, I think, sums up what Ames really is saying throughout:
"Though I must say all this has given me a new glimpse of the ongoingness of the world. We fly forgotten as a dream, certainly, leaving the forgetful world behind us to trample and mar and misplace everything we ever cared for. That is just the way of it, and it is remarkable." (P. 218)