Race in Gilead

To continue with Gilead: Apart from fatherhood, the theme in that grabs me is race. It's the place of slavery and race in this novel that justifies saying that the book is about America itself.

It takes a while for the theme to emerge and that's what's brilliant about it; race is easily submerged in white America, and Robinson makes her treatment of race more effective by framing the white town of Gilead its own terms before introducing the realities it ignores.

Two white individuals, Grandfather Ames and Jack Boughton, made closer connections to blacks and before we understand that they recognized race as a problem, we learn to mistrust them as the people of the town did. The once-abolitionist grandfather who appreciated the preaching at the Negro church had, according to Ames, a "strenuousness in ethical matters" and a "narrow vision." Jack Boughton got into all kinds of trouble. John Ames is a sympathetic narrator, but even he takes it for granted that these two men rightfully belong on the margins of society. If they're not even respectable, what claim can they make to criticize? The trajectories of these characters normalize the racial exclusions of American society.

Robinson's depiction of race is most deft in the Des Moines baseball story. Baseball may be the only thing the fathers, sons, friends, and brothers in Gilead have in common. When John was a boy, his ancient grandfather, missing one eye, took him all the way to Des Moines to watch Bud Fowler play. The game promised to be a great treat, but it was disappointing: the game rained out in the fifth inning. The denouement is even more of a non-event. Ames's recalls about Fowler: " I followed his career in the newspaper for years, until they started up the Negro Leagues, and then I sort of lost track of him."

This image is remarkable: a half-blind radical abolitionist taking his grandson to watch a black baseball hero. The whole thing went fell flat and years later his grandson still misses the point about why his grandfather chose this hero or about why excluding the hero from the sport was wrong. Through his widowed years, radio baseball was his lifeline, but John Ames can't see the hateful swell beneath this grace. What a bittersweet effect for readers when race appears in the definitive American pastoral: Iowa baseball. Nostalgia for Iowa tastes different once Bleeding Kansas is stirred in.

But John Ames doesn't sense the tension. He isn't concerned about what he recalls as a "nuisance" fire at the Negro Church. After the fire, the town's black population moved to Chicago, but Ames doesn't question the reasons for the exodus. The Negroes left; the Lithuanians moved in. To him, it's just a rhythm of peaceful town life.

Jack Boughton always could stir Ames up. At the very end Jack Boughton's story about race strikes him, and this is the last lesson of his life. It's a big lesson for a dying man and shakes his certitudes: "I woke up this morning thinking this town might as well be standing on the absolute floor of hell for all the truth there is in it, and the fault is mine as much as anyone's...It seems to me now we never looked up from the trouble we had just getting by to put the obvious question, that is, to ask what it was the Lord was trying to make us understand."

It's too late for Ames to address the question, but the book is written as a letter for his young son and is thus oriented toward the future. Ames's late revelation restores Kansas to the story he's telling about Iowa and America. "What have I to leave you but the ruins of old courage, and the lore of old gallantry and hope? Well, as I have said, it is all an ember now, and the Good Lord will surely someday breathe it into flame again."

I'm so moved by Robinson's treatment of race that I'm going to rag on one reviewer who just didn't get it. Tessa Hadley, who wrote on Gilead in the London Review of Books, entirely missed the point. It's too bad, because hers is one of the only early reviews to comment on the place of race in the book. Unfortunately, she didn't read carefully enough to see the development within Ames.

In fact, Hadley characterizes Ames as incapable of "fresh thought." The review is odd because it conflates a criticism of Ames's self-understanding with one of Robinson's own faith and politics. It states the book postulates "a continuum between the grandfather’s activism spurred by passionate faith and Ames’s late-life celebrations of a world radiant with God’s love." The reviewer hasn't figured out how the conversation with Jack Boughton humbled Ames's satisfaction with his small world.

Most egregiously, Hadley opines that at the end Ames achieves a "mere acquiescence to the existence of Jack’s mixed-race child [that] can’t stand all by itself for a significant engagement against injustice." Well, no, of course it couldn't, but Ames achieves more than a "mere acquiescence." Acquiescence would not cause him to feel as if he were on the "floor of hell." Because Hadley can't see that Ames has grown over the course of the book, she doesn't see that his late arrival at understanding magnifies the loss created by his death. His final words to his son are: "I'll pray that you grow up a brave man in a brave country. I will pray that you find a way to be useful."

It's worthwhile, I think, to clarify this point. This message from a dying man to his son, is a most poignant statement of sadness and hope for this country.

Fatherhood in Gilead

I've read nine novels in the past year. Seven were by J.K. Rowling and two, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson and The Road by Cormac McCarthy, were about fatherhood. Both won Pulitzer Prizes, both were immensely powerful.

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.