Home
Marilynne Robinson
Reviewed by Damian Barr

Home sweet home. It’s where the heart is. Marilynne Robinson’s title is the stuff of countless clichés and cross-stitching samples. Yet we all have a home or a memory of one or an ideal one. It’s this home we all share that Robinson builds on so powerfully.

The story is biblically simple: the prodigal son, Jack Boughton, returns home from two decades of drinking and wandering to whiter-than-white Gilead, Iowa. There he finds Glory, his caring-but-conflicted little sister, tending their fast-fading father, Reverend Boughton. The old-fashioned furniture is shabbier, the barn is collapsing and the garden overgrown. His other brothers and sisters have flown the nest and his mother has died but their spirits stay close. Also lingering are the ghosts of mistakes long made and hearts long broken. The Boughtons are Presbyterian—they talk little but say lots. They may feel haunted but speak of souls not ghosts.

Home is the companion book to Gilead, Robinson’s previous novel set in this small fictional town. Elsewhere there are race riots as segregated American burns. In Gilead little changes. You don’t need to read that to enjoy this—Home stands alone.

‘What does it mean to come home?’ wonders Glory. Her career as a school-teacher was sacrificed because she wasn’t allowed to teach when she married. Not that she did get married: her fiancé spent all her money then abandoned her. This woman’s place is in the home (just not the one she dreams of). ‘Glory has always thought home would be a house less cluttered and ungainly then this one, in a town larger than Gilead, or a city, where someone would be her intimate friend and the father of her children.’ That dream is gone and at just 39 Glory feels middle-aged.

Her disappointment never turns to bitterness—not wholly. She has moments (we all do). This is one. ‘Did she choose to be there, in that house, in Gilead? No, she certainly did not. Her father needed looking after, and she had to be somewhere, like every other human being on earth. What an embarrassment that was…But you make the best of things. People respect that.’ She keeps praying for herself and for others. Mostly for her long-lost brother Jack.

Someone hears Glory’s prayers because Jack does return.

‘He stepped through the doorway and paused there. He was wearing his jacket and tie. He looked tentative, as if he were afraid he might presume, and as if he would be happier somewhere else.’

Glory helps Jack heal some of his physical and emotional scars. He helps her accept her home. Their father slips slowly away. Little happens plot-wise but secrets are uncovered, kindnesses given, cruelties taken and the father-son relationship explored to its final tragic parting.

Robinson makes us understand home isn’t just a place—it’s something we carry with us. And, as adults, we must be at home with ourselves, our pasts and our futures.