Gilead, our March book club selection

To avoid watching the news and the mess Biden has made of our lives, I've been reading the March book club selection while on the exercycle. Gilead by Marilynne Robison promises to be an interesting read, and I believe it's the first of a series. So I've looked for a few reviews. Her first novel was "Housekeeping" but it was about 24 years before she wrote her second.

But Gilead, a book about fathers and sons, where Housekeeping was a book about girls and women, and fragmentary where one of Housekeeping's achievements was its fluid narrative completeness, takes an opposing narratorial position with a protagonist whose insider credentials could not be stronger. In Genesis, in the story of Joseph, Gilead is the casually mentioned place left behind by the merchants who bought Joseph from his brothers. Robinson's Gilead is a small American town in Iowa in 1956. John Ames, a preacher in his mid-70s whose heart is failing him, is writing letters to his only child, now aged six, so that when the boy reaches an adulthood his father won't see, he'll at least have this posthumous one-sided conversation: "While you read this, I am imperishable, somehow more alive than I have ever been."

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/apr/16/fiction.alismith

"GILEAD is better than a good book. It is a slim, spare, yet exquisite and wonderfully realized story that will long stand as one of fiction’s finest reflections on the sacramental dimensions of life, especially the Christian life lived in the routines and wonderments of prayer. It is, like a good sermon, a passionate meditation.

The book is slender only in the number of its pages — a mere 247. Otherwise, it is a fuller, richer and more deeply textured novel than most contemporary fiction twice its size. Robinson makes use of a form — the epistolary novel — that is classic but one of the most difficult to pull off well. It can often seem forced and cumbersome and — to the contemporary reader more attuned to e-mail and instant-messaging rather than the carefully considered craft of composing a letter — irritating in its deliberate pace.

Robinson’s epistle takes the form of a letter from 76-year-old John Ames, a fourth-generation Congregationalist minister, to his just-about-seven-year-old son. Ames is suffering from heart disease, and his letter, written in 1956, is a summing up of the past sprinkled with anecdotes and advice and sketches of the present, especially of his son and his wife and his best friend, also a minister."https://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2005/03/18/march-18-2005-book-review-gilead-by-marilynne-robinson/4232/