Home, by Marilynne Robinson

There are very few novels written by living novelists that I wish I had written myself and Marilynne Robinson has written two of them. Gilead, the extraordinarily beautiful, patient, scrupulous unfolding of the life of its elderly narrator, John Ames, a pastor in a small town in Iowa, was one. Home, her latest, is even finer than its predecessor. I would give teeth to have written it. The two novels, while perfectly capable of being read independently, form a diptych. Both are located in the eponymous town Gilead; both concern the lives of two families, whose fathers, John Ames and Robert Boughton, have been, since their youthful seminary days, colleagues in the Protestant church, neighbours, sparring partners and fast friends. Gilead, a father's reminiscences, is written for Ames' young son Robert, born to him late in life by his gentle young wife, Lila. Entwined with Ames's own family recollections are those of the Boughton family, most prominently the doings of the black sheep of the family, Jack. During the course of Gilead, Jack returns home after a 20-year absence. An old object of disapproval, he briefly becomes the target of Ames's jealousy, because of Jack's relative youth and Lila's easy liking for him. But, finally, we learn the reason for Jack's visits to the Ames household, when he unburdens himself to the man for whom he is named. (It is important that the two friends have bestowed on each other's beloved sons their own Christian names.)

Home is written from the perspective of the Boughton household. Though not in the confiding first person of Gilead, it is none the less exceptionally intimate in tone. The principal gaze is on the child/parent relationship of Jack and his fiercely devoted but emotionally maladroit father. Inescapably involved in this fraught drama is Glory, the youngest Boughton child, who has also come home (in wounded flight from a duplicitous fiancé), to keep house for her infirm father.

The unlooked for arrival of Jack has an alchemical effect upon the household. Old Boughton is beside himself with joy. Jack is the prodigal son whose unexplained absence has created a black hole at the centre of his father's being, pulling into it much of the emotional life of his large and vivid family. Jack was always the misfit, the outsider, the miscreant who danced on the edge, embracing delinquency, we sense, as a declaration of independence. He is the one, in short, for whom the house was never home (the irony being that this has vitiated the sense of home for the other siblings). Now he has returned with all the prodigal's farouche prickliness, self-loathing and despair. But unlike his Biblical counterpart, the miraculous restoration never happens. Or never quite enough.

Jack fits as uneasily into the contracted Boughton household as he did as a wayward and puzzling child. His father's hungry longing for his lost son only distances the two further, despite the painfully apparent need each have for the other's love and approval. Jack's past delinquencies cast long shadows. As a youth, he fathered a child whom he abandoned and who subsequently died. When he steels himself to attend church, it is to hear a sermon apparently directed at this dereliction. In one particularly excruciating scene, when a small sum of money has gone missing from a village store, old Boughton betrays his inveterate suspicion of Jack when he offers his children the use of a bank account, a woefully transparent move to ensure his ' out-at-elbows son has funds to keep him straight. We know from Gilead (and will learn more eloquently at the close of Home) that Jack has a secret. But it is not, as his father assumes, and, in his anxiety, cannot help expressing, a shameful one. Slowly, inevitably, faced with these incremental failures of understanding, Jack's efforts to make himself valuable to the home he never had begin to crumble. He reverts to drink, observed by Glory whose emotional tact is not adequate to prevent his hideously bungled attempt at suicide. Yet it is the delicate growth of tentative trust between the two siblings which forms the skein of redeeming promise in this otherwise acutely painful narrative of human misunderstanding.

Home is not a novel in which plot matters. Like Jane Austen, but in a different key, Robinson's intent focus is the super-subtleties of human exchange. The heart of this utterly absorbing, precisely observed, marvellous novel is the fumbling inadequacy of love, its inability to avert our terrible capacity to wound and maim, not even but especially, those nearest and dearest to us.

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