Robinson’s portrayal of religion is especially deft instead of opiate or panacea, her narrator’s Christianity serves as a lens, providing a stasis and a vocabulary through which the novel can wrestle with its concerns. If Robinson’s territory here is the spiritual life of one man in particular, her thematic concern is how we in general can face the ends of our lives without despair or resort to existential reframings of the problem-how we can face the prospect of death, in fact, with quiet gratitude and even joy. But Robinson is also concerned with death, not only as the inevitable end of that communion but also as its thematic counterpoint. This is a novel that celebrates life, that variegated communion between inner and outer worlds, between ego and experience. The narrative is never as important as the meditations that surround it. Because it’s written as a series of missives from the aged narrator to his young son, meant not to be read until long after the narrator’s death, Gilead is largely plotless-a conflict of sorts between the narrator and a friend’s child does eventually develop, but it is a quiet conflict, and one that doesn’t become clear until nearly halfway through the novel. In this context, Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead comes not just as a breath of fresh air, but as a ray of light, quietly penetrating to the heart of mysteries regarding joy and love, life and death. Authors able to give the lie to Tolstoy by rendering joy as a complex substance are few and far between: think Ron Carlson, Laurie Colwin, Ellen Gilchrist, Richard Russo.

Yet too often, contemporary literature ignores this. Asked about our defining or most enlightening moments, most of us are as likely to recount happy memories as we are moments of despair. We need look no further than our own lives to recognize the problem we’ll encounter if we preoccupy ourselves with the Tolstoyan “unhappy family” at the expense of the happy ones. It often feels as if the contemporary literary scene has internalized Anna Karenina’s dictum on the nature of happiness-that it is not idiosyncratic, with the implication that it is not worth the kind of careful attention that literature applies to its subjects.

Gilead fiction