‘Lila,’an ugly back story written beautifully, follows ‘Gilead’

In “Gilead,” Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2004 novel, an aging pastor named John Ames writes a long letter to his son. Ames is nearing the end of his days, and before he goes he wants to share a few lessons that might guide the boy in the years ahead.

Here’s what the old-timer has to say about Lila, his much younger second wife: “Now, your mother never talks about herself, really, and she never admits to having felt any sort of grief in her life at all. That’s her courage, her pride, and I know you will be respectful of it, and remember at the same time that a very, very great gentleness is called for, a great kindness. Because no one ever has that sort of courage who hasn’t needed it.”

Alluded to but mostly unexplored in “Gilead,” the hardships that shaped this resilient woman are the focus of Robinson’s latest, the wistful and charming “Lila.”

It’s her third consecutive novel based in the fictional small town of Gilead, Iowa. The wisdom and subtlety with which Robinson continues to explore the lives of its inhabitants has established this sequence of books as one of the extraordinary ongoing projects in American fiction. In September, “Lila” was named one of 10 titles in the running for the National Book Award for fiction.

Backtracking from the mid-1950s setting of “Gilead,” most of “Lila” takes place in the ’30s and ’40s.

Though we know from Robinson’s earlier work that her title character will come to enjoy a measure of domestic serenity, she’s anything but settled in the new book’s opening pages.

Neglected by her biological family, Lila is just a child when she’s spirited away from home by a bighearted, if somewhat deranged, woman called Doll. Lila is quickly accepted as a member of Doll’s transient crew. They lead an arduous life. The nomadic Midwesterners forage for provisions, and they take odd jobs in kitchens and on farms.

When bad weather, legal trouble or other forms of adversity dictate, they pick up their belongings and search for a new home.

“There was a long time when Lila didn’t know that words had letters, or that there were other names for seasons than planting and haying,” Robinson writes. “Walk south ahead of the weather, walk north in time for the crops.”

After a youth of ignorance and insecurity, Lila ends up working in a St. Louis brothel. Her unsophisticated ways are mocked by the other women of the house, and her inherent kindness is exploited by the establishment’s cruel owner, who confiscates Lila’s belongings and dragoons her into a spell of indentured servitude.

Her wanderings eventually land her in Gilead, where she takes up residence in an abandoned shack. It’s the early 1940s by now, and she’s in her 20s. John Ames, a wise and humble local pastor, is more than twice her age. But when Lila, trying to stay dry in a downpour, ducks into Ames’ church one Sunday morning, they find themselves drawn to one another.

Lila demonstrates her feelings by tending the grave sites that memorialize Ames’ late wife and son, and he invites her to drop by his small house for a meal or a chat. She borrows a Bible from Ames’ church and uses it to improve her reading and writing skills. Patient and undogmatic, he answers her questions about Ezekiel and Job.

Their conversations will hit home with many believers and skeptics alike. There’s no proselytizing going on here, just a series of clear-eyed exchanges about the nature of faith and the folly of trying to fathom the afterlife.

“(T)hinking that other people might go to hell just feels evil to me, like a very grave sin,” Ames says. “You can’t see the world the way you ought to if you let yourself do that. Any judgment of the kind is a great presumption.”

Robinson’s prose is precise and simple, and always pleasing to the reader’s ear. Couple these qualities with her profound respect for her characters’ idiosyncrasies, and you have a novel of uncommon virtuosity and intelligence.

Late in the book, Lila, having given birth to the couple’s son, ponders what life will be like when her husband is gone. John Ames is, after all, more than 30 years her senior.

“(I)f someday she opened the front door,” Robinson writes, “and there, where the flower gardens and the fence and the gate ought to be, was that old life, the raggedy meadows and pastures and the cornfields and the orchards, she might just set the child on her hip and walk out into it, the buzz and the smell and the damp of it, the breath of it like her own breath, her own sweat.”

In a single breath, Robinson captures the dread with which Lila regards her past, the anxiety that accompanies the impending loss of a loved one, and the sweep of a natural world that can be both beautiful and foreboding.

It’s tempting to call this a uniquely evocative piece of writing. But that would be wrong. There are sentences just as satisfying on almost every page of this stirring novel.

This story was originally published October 10, 2014 at 7:00 AM with the headline "‘Lila,’an ugly back story written beautifully, follows ‘Gilead’."