The Attempt to See

LilaBy Marilynne RobinsonFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014

According to Genesis, the first human born to a woman killed the second one, who became the first human to die. In the story of Cain and Abel the life cycle plays out for the first time, and many of the themes that story addresses are returned to throughout the history of Western literature. Chief among these them is family, imperfect and makeshift as it always is. In this case, these brothers were never meant to exist, and were only born because of their parents’ sin. All of the attendant passions are there, from hate to love, envy to grief, resentment to gratitude. When Cain is found out, he is subject to God’s wrath and sent from his family home under the curses of futility and vagrancy, with a mark to keep him free from harm, but also free from company.The characters populating Marilynne Robinson’s new novel, Lila, experience all of what is described in the story of Cain and Abel, but the sin, the cause of the trouble, is more difficult to place, rooted deeper in their psyches and in their shared history. Redemption is similarly elusive, though not vanished, and Robinson balances hope and despair with a sharp and subtle vision of how easily the shift is made from one to the other.Lila is a prequel both to Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead and also that book’s companion, Home (2008). All three take place in the fictional Iowa town of Gilead, and focus on a different member of the community. Gilead consists of philosophico-religious reflections on love, suffering and divinity in the voice of John Ames, an aged pastor with a much younger wife. Home centers on the Boughton family, the patriarch of which is Ames’ closest friend and confidant.Told in a variably elliptical style, which conceals searing and tumultuous poetry beneath an external placidity suited to its long-suffering but still sensitive protagonist, Lila tells how the eponymous character came from the unforgiving highways and itinerant workers camps of Depression-era middle America to become Ames’ wife in tranquil, albeit dilapidated, Gilead.The novel begins with Lila as a child, left to suffer by the door of her family home, only to be taken up (that is, stolen) by the mysterious yet beloved Doll, a woman Lila frequently recalls as ugly—she even bears a vivid scar across her face, which, much like Cain’s mark, keeps her isolated but, for the most part, safe. (While Doll may come into contact with threats and even moments of violence, all of the real harm inflicted on her is visited upon whomever commits it in far greater proportion, just as God tells Cain.) She becomes a mother and a sister to Lila, and the two travel the countryside together, never staying long in one place for fear Doll might be recognized as Lila’s kidnapper. This charge is among her many other criminal acts, for which she suffers deep regret every day she is with Lila. After a test of character, they are allowed to travel with another itinerant family, headed by the hard-bitten Doane, though this is never guaranteed. Lila accepts it as her fate that even amongst other wanderers, she will be isolated.

She worked as hard as any of the children. She didn’t make them laugh the way Mellie did, but she never complained, she never took more than her share. She knew better than to mention school. But when hard times came they left her behind. There were people Doane just didn’t take to.

They travel, work, and eat together, eking out a living in unspeakably cruel conditions. But they come to accept this kind of life, even to find wisdom in it, which is the wisdom Lila clings to even after she gets used to her comfortable life with the Reverend Ames.Much of the novel consists in Lila’s memories of that rough-and-tumble life, challenging the forgiving and eminently gentle Christianity Ames—who is himself no novice in suffering—wishes to believe in. She goes down to the cemetery where Ames’ first wife and young son are buried, and reflects on the possibility of redemption for all the pain they had each experienced:

It would be a strange kind of heaven, after all they’d been through, and all that waiting, if he did not feel a different peace when he stood beside them. Lila could watch them, and love them, because old Doll would be there to say, “It don’t matter.” Don’t want what you don’t need and you’ll be fine. Don’t want what you can’t have. Doll would be there, ugly with all the trouble of her life. Lila might not know her otherwise.

These memories are recalled alongside a narrative set some time in the late-1940’s, early-1950’s. Lila, now an adult, wanders into the church in Gilead, having no other place to keep out of the rain. She meets Ames, who treats her kindly, despite her utter lack of trust in him, or in anyone she meets. This becomes a theme in their relationship, from their tender, almost painfully hesitant courtship, all the way through their uncertain and faltering marriage. Even in the closing pages of the book, Ames asks that Lila simply wait until their child is born to leave, though it is clear, despite her internal wavering, that she has found a home in Gilead.The acceptance of home is the crucial struggle of the novel, and it is deeply connected to the Christianity both Reverend Ames and the author adhere to. This is a particularly American strain of Calvinism, in which both the austerity and perplexity of the world are met with a steadfast obedience to God. This might sound authoritarian, and so not in synch with the supreme gentleness of John Ames or the searching capaciousness of Robinson’s prose, but a great deal of the novel seems committed to securing the proposition that the only thing equal to the immensity of human suffering and confusion is the serenity found in devotion and faith—or at least their possibility.This Calvinist line is Robinson’s as well as it is her character’s. Her long career, though short on novels (add only 1980’s Housekeeping to her list of fiction), has been studded with essays by turn polemic and profound, at times railing against the inanities of modern secular and spiritual life but always expressive of her own deep struggle with an unyielding conviction in Protestantism.In her essay collection, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought, the author, who has taught for years at the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop, attempted to redress a wide variety of contemporary woes, from the burden of political correctness to the shallow and ill-conceived view of science as the redeemer of mankind. At the root of all of these concerns is a misunderstanding of religion. She writes in “Darwinism:”

The Creationist position has long been owned by the Religious Right, and the Darwinist position by the Irreligious Right. The differences between these camps are intractable because they are meaningless. People who insist that the sacredness of Scripture depends on belief in creation in a literal six days seem never to insist on a literal reading of "to him who asks, give," or "sell what you have and give the money to the poor." In fact, their politics and economics align themselves quite precisely with those of their adversaries, who yearn to disburden themselves of the weak, and to unshackle the great creative forces of competition. The defenders of "religion" have made religion seem foolish while rendering it mute in the face of a prolonged and highly effective assault on the poor. The defenders of "science" have imputed objectivity and rigor to an account of reality whose origins and consequences are indisputably economic, social, and political.

These are her political views, and, to be sure, her considerable polemic skill makes her own position seem, perhaps, slightly too easy to hold. That is to say, in arguing against modern misconceptions, Robinson does not represent her own views to the fullest possible extentWhen the details of those views become apparent, one is astonished to find at once their traditionalism and Robinson’s willingness to face their most difficult aspects. She has characterized herself as a “liberal Protestant,” though most of her questions and convictions fall under straight-forward Calvinism, whose legacy she sees as completely misrepresented. She is most intrigued by what she has repeatedly called the center of Calvin’s theology: perception.

Perception is flawed by our Adamic sinfulness, it is brilliant all the same and, by the grace of God, flooded with the beauty of the world God made for us.

The real human task, then, is to seek out and see clearly the truth of things and in things. For Robinson, Scripture and theology are of great assistance in this, but in the delicate struggle of her crystalline prose we see her attempt a truly unmediated vision, a spiritual connection which manifests itself physically without yielding to the immanent decay of the purely material.It is particular to Robinson’s style that she is attuned both to the high cultural and historical expressions of religious questioning, and also to their manifestations in everyday life. At times the line between the two is evocatively blurred, so that certain passages become equally responses to, say, Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov and to Lila’s humble confusion. In one episode, Ames reflects on a sermon he wrote in the middle of the night, reading from a handwritten page and interjecting as the thought carries him away from what he has written. The result of this meditation is what Alyosha might have said in response to the older Karamazov’s acerbic, rationalistic interrogation, had he only been a bit more experienced

‘When I say that much the greater part of our existence is unknowable by us because it rests with God, who is unknowable, I acknowledge His grace in allowing us to feel that we know any slightest part of it. Therefore we have no way to reconcile its elements, because they are what we are given out of no necessity at all except God’s grace in sustaining us as creatures we can recognize ourselves as.’ That’s always seemed remarkable to me, that we can do that. That we can’t help but do it. ‘So joy can be joy and sorrow can be sorrow, with neither of them casting either light or shadow on the other.’

In light of these reflections, much of what perplexes and depresses the wanderers in Lila (and, indeed us, readers) is phrased incorrectly, thought of in the wrong light. The sought-after reconciliation between the deepest sorrows and most ecstatic joys is not possible, even in thought, by looking out into world. This kind of wisdom, or in more religious terms, salvation, is to be found only in scripture and attempting to commune with God through prayer. This deeply intense passage is one of many which, far from condescending to struggle of human life, sees the highest thoughts rising directly out of it:

“Well,” she said. “Near as I can tell, you were wanting to reconcile things by saying they can’t be reconciled. I guess I know what you mean by reconcile.”

This is a highly systematized theology, though it rarely seems so in Robinson’s writing, and her main character becomes more open (perhaps subject) to it as she becomes more established in Gilead. Lila practices copying passages from her Bible, a task reminiscent of medieval monasticism, and reflects on her life in increasingly articulate terms. Indeed, as she and her home life becomes stable, so too does her identity. Before marrying Ames, she lives alone in a cabin at the edge of town, and the change from wanderer to wife begins with recognizing her rootlessness:

Her name had the likeness of a name. She had the likeness of a woman, with hands but no face at all, since she never let herself see it. She had the likeness of a life, because she was all alone in it. She lived in the likeness of a house, with walls and a roof and a door that kept nothing in and nothing out.

And though she was not entirely lost until Doll’s departure, at which point Lila enters a brothel in St. Louis (she was “no good at whoring,” and so became the housemaid of the place), no transcendence possible. Only when she finds a home, along with love, can she begin to seek answers. She asks over and again “why things happen the way they do,” and though she finds no answers, Lila finds a kind of peace in wrestling with the question. This is a summation of what would seem to be Robinson’s key proposition. Its success depends on the willingness of the lost to be found, which takes recognizing when one is lost. The extraordinary effort, that Robinson’s prose exerts is directed first toward that recognition, and second toward that willingness.____Jack Hanson's previous reviews & poetry for Open Letters can be found here.