“I prefer to think of my favorite writers off somewhere writing.” Because of the pandemic, though, it had been months since she had left her summer house, by a lake in Saratoga Springs, so she was open to an adventure. She does not generally like visiting the houses of writers gone from this world. Time and wind and winter storms have had their way with them, and today only one remains.Įarlier this summer, Marilynne Robinson followed a path through the fallow field that used to be Frost’s orchard, then looked for a long time at the last of his plantings. A hundred years ago, Robert Frost bought a ninety-acre farm near South Shaftsbury, Vermont it came with an old stone house and a pair of barns, but he also wanted an orchard, so he planted hundreds of apple trees. It seems appropriate that the last novel in Robinson’s Gilead quartet (the author followed Gilead with Home in 2008 and Lila in 2014) will be published one month before this year’s presidential elections.It is the only one left.

Barack Obama famously kept the book on him while he was campaigning in Iowa. Last fall, various publications included Gilead in their end-of-decade roundups of the best and most influential books of the 21st century so far. Ames contemplated his impending death while reflecting on the books and thinkers he admired, admiring the plain beauty of laughter, telling us about the love he had for wife, Lila, and offering prayers for their young son, to whom Gilead is addressed. Through Ames, Robinson explored matters of faith, forgiveness, jealousy, parenthood, and familial inheritance. Immediately, the story of John Ames, a dying Congregationalist minister in the fictional town of Gilead, Iowa, assured me that my worries were unfounded. I was reading so much theoretical writing that I feared I was losing the ability to read a story and appreciate it on its own terms, without overanalyzing.

Graduate school was on my mind at the time. When I read Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead (2004) for the first time a couple of years ago, I felt grateful to have found a book that eschewed cynicism in favor of earnestness and sincerity.

Gilead fiction