There are books that are markers, books that you read at the exact moment when you needed to read them, books that ask the questions you are still trying to form into words, books that change your course.
Seven years ago I picked up Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead for the first time. Seven years ago I wrote my first poem. I just completed my MFA in poetry this summer.
Marilynne Robinson shouldn’t be able to do what she does. It seems impossible to create characters shrouded in mystery yet full of life, characters in doubt and love and life. It is like they grew from the same Iowa soil they seek to tame.
Lila, Robinson’s newest addition to her books set in the small town of Gilead, Iowa (Gilead and Home being the previous) is the best yet. Lila, the Reverend John Ames’ wife, has been a reliable sidekick, a foil to fill in the shadows of other characters of the books. But here, in her own book, an itinerant woman living in a shack outside of Gilead, she is lovely. Whereas the Reverend opened his memories up to us in the pages of Gilead, Lila keeps us in the shadows, slowly unspooling her past as she attempts to sew herself into something new.
If you have never had the pleasure to read Marilynne Robinson, do it now. Although her novels are interwoven, they stand alone. I promise that she reads like nobody you have ever read before.
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