I may be in a minority on this point, but compared with other McCarthy novels I read I found The Road to be relatively optimistic. The burnt-over world is utter dystopia, but the father and son love each other perfectly. At the end McCarthy suggests it's possible to live sustainably in an ashy world without photosynthesis, which is more hopeful than anything current science tells us. So, the book left me feeling more "up" than I did after reading All the Pretty Horses, even if it did motivate me to start researching what Mormons recommend for a year's food supply.
I've thought about McCarthy's world a lot, but what with the cannibalism and buggery, I don't think I could bear to read it again, much less see the movie. On the other hand, I've just reread Gilead and it's haunting me. All the reviews make much of the narrator's Calvinism, but it's an atypical sort of Calvinism. His religion is of a gracious father God; he barely mentions Jesus. I guess it's possible that a Congregational minister in southwest Iowa could be so possessed by everyday grace to the exclusion of sin and atonement, but he would be a remote outlier among his preacher peers.
Still, I am captured by his voice, his story. It's a story of fathers and sons and of their relations with each other, God, and finally America. Ames is facing death and is recounting his life for the benefit of his young son. He makes much of the observation that the Bible has no bad parents. Similarly, the fathers in the book aren't absent or abusive to children (save one). For their part, the youth recognize and respect their fathers, but in every case but one, fathers and sons suffer estrangement and agony. As Ames puts it: "A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension." Robinson's fine craft produces a compelling story of generational tension mutating and reproducing itself.
John Ames came from a male line of preachers, but unity in doctrine or practice evaded them. The grandfather had been a radical abolitionist in Bleeding Kansas. When his son, Ames's father, witnessed his violence in the name of God's fury, he could not reconcile himself to it. Decades later, frustrated with the lack of urgency in his son's religion, the old man ran back to Kansas to die. In the next generation, John Ames's older brother Edward studied theology, but broke with their father over the faith itself. John became a preacher and took up his father's church in Gilead.
John's first wife and daughter died when he was young, but the pattern of estrangement continues with his namesake, the child of his best friend, the Presbyterian preacher "old Boughten." No common prodigal, Jack Boughton is a charmer with a deep mean streak. Nonetheless, Rev. Boughten loves him. John Ames, on the other hand, sees through Jack and doesn't like the view. The only unfraught father-son relationship is between the dying Ames and his adored boy, born after his second marriage when he was sixty-seven.
Ames is weak and sick. His heart is giving out and his imminent death will be a tragedy for his boy and wife, younger by probably forty years. His wife also had seen untold loss and hardship before she met him. It is all sadder because Ames never saved any money and his wife and boy will have a hard life after he goes. But no one is bitter. After seven years of unexpected love, Ames is filled with a luminous appreciation for life, God, his son, and his wife. There's nothing clap-happy about it, and he never sentimentalizes pain and poverty. Ames says, "There are a thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient." Under Robinson's hand, this makes sense.
As powerful as the story of the late-blooming, soon-withering fatherhood is, I was more rattled by Ames's revelations about himself and his own father. These are withheld until the end of the letter to his son. At the end of his preaching career, John Ames's father left poor, dusty, backwards Gilead to retire on the Gulf Coast with his rationalist older son Edward. The pretext was the climate, but move gave him the opportunity to shed his religion. (Thinking it over, this is more implausible to me than Ames's beatifics.) Having abandoned Gilead, Ames senior wanted union with both his sons, Edward the atheist philosophy professor and John the widowed small-town preacher. The father returned to Gilead to invite John to join them, to convince him that his world and God were too limited to deserve such dedication.
John couldn't abandon the town or his faith. He also couldn't tolerate his father's condescension. His enduring anger toward his father is rivaled only by that for the villainous Jack Boughton. Ames may not have found any unfaithful fathers in the Bible, but his own father turned away from him. Ames recounts for his own son: "My father threw me back on myself, and on the Lord. That's a fact, so I find little to regret. It cost me a good deal of sorrow, but I learned from it."
John Ames's comfort lies in God, the perfect father whose love had carried him through the loss of a spouse, child, and father. It's a mark of God's grace that his beloved wife first came to his church on Pentecost. In dying, he leaves his wife, his son, and himself to that mercy. The close of the book allows Ames realization of Gilead's and his own limitations, but also a reconciliation with Jack Boughton, delivered in soaring, aching language. His comfort is so deep and his hope so modest that there's no embarrassment in feeling it with him. For me, it was an honor to have known John Ames, even if I didn't always understand him, even if he never mounted a prophetic call such as his grandfather's.
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