Nick Moschella

Home: A Novel

Ξ October 7th, 2010 | → 0 Comments | ∇ The Home |

Home: A Novel :

Amazon Best of the Month, September 2008: “What does it mean to come home?” In one way or another, every character in Home is searching for that answer. Glory Boughton, now 38 and lovelorn, has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father. Her wayward brother Jack also finds his way back, though his is an uneasy homecoming, reverberating with the scandal that drove him away twenty years earlier. Glory and Jack unravel their stories slowly, speaking to each other more in movements than in words–a careful glance here, a chair pulled out from the table there–against a domestic backdrop so richly imagined you may be fooled into believing their house is your own. Meanwhile, their father, whose ebullient love for his children is a welcome counterpoint to Glory and Jack’s conflicted emotions, experiences his own kind of reckoning as he yearns to understand his troubled son. There is a simplicity to this story that belies the complexity of its characters–they are bound together by a profound capacity for love and by an equally powerful sense of private conviction that tries the ties that bind, but never breaks them. It’s a delicate sort of tension that you think would resist exposition–and in fact these characters seem to want nothing more than, as Glory says, to treat “one another’s deceptions like truth”–but Marilynne Robinson’s fine, tender prose imbues this family’s secrets with an overwhelming grace. –Anne Bartholomew

Pitiful – reader –
This book should never have been published and, now that it has, no one should bother reading it. I loved Gilead and I think Robinson’s prose is generally wonderful. Her style reminds me of a Horton Foote play, gentle, insightful relationships with quiet explorations of emotions as well as ideas. Unfortunately, though, I think the only reason this book, Home, ever saw the light of day was because of the success of Gilead.

This was one long wallow in pity, self and otherwise. Jack is the wimpiest character to make his way into serious fiction and there is zero development from start to finish unless one considers going from whiney to whinier to whiniest some form of development. Glory also has her share of self-pity but reserves most of it to pour out onto her hapless brother, Jack. Old man Boughton is just plain pitiful in a hurtful, passive-aggressive fashion. Not a very likable cast to spend one’s time with over the course of a whole novel in which not a lot happens except the constant whinging. I hung in there to the end, holding out some hope for redemption of some kind or other, for some character or other, but they all went nowhere but down. Not that I need or even hope for a happy ending, just for some form of viable life to emerge. I have never been sorrier that I forced myself to read to the end.

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• Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (The Terry Lectures Series)
• So Long, See You Tomorrow

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