I've written before about my interests in family history, genealogical fiction, and their place in American literature. Now I'm happy to add a new novel to my growing list of works--among them Steinbeck's East of Eden, Annie Proulx's Accordian Crimes, and Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain--that think about what it is to be American through stories of a family's successive generations: Marilynne Robinson's Gilead. Published last fall, Robinson's first novel since her acclaimed 1980 debut, Housekeeping, was long-awaited and eagerly scrutinized. The verdict was that Robinson's new work was well worth the wait, that it was an unusually probing, intellectually serious novel about questions that are at once increasingly pressing and increasingly unpopular to ask--questions about faith, belief, effort, work, self-examination, judgement, doubt, and the complicated, often tortured kinds of love that emerge from personalities wrapped around puritanically-tinged habits of introspection.

Robinson is the unapologetic descendant of a theologically-oriented thread of American letters that has been all but buried over the last century, and that makes for prose that is at once painfully elegiac and pointedly philosophical. The book is told in the form of a letter from a dying Iowa preacher to his young son, and the story it tells is the story of his family's history. Early on, the preacher describes how, as a boy, he and his father (also a preacher) hunted the remote reaches of late nineteenth-century Kansas for his grandfather's lost grave. As an example of Robinson's remarkable combination of reverie and historical reflection, the passage is worth quoting at length:

It was so bad out there we couldn't buy food. We stopped at a farmstead and asked the lady, and she took a little bundle down from a cupboard and showed us some coins and bills and said, "It might as well be Confederate for all the good it does me." The general store had closed, and she couldn't get salt or sugar or flour. We traded her some of our miserable jerky--I've never been able to stand the sight of it since then--for two boiled eggs and two boiled potatoes, which tasted wonderful even without salt.

Then my father asked after his father and she said, Why, yes, he'd been in the neighborhood. She didn't know he had died, but she knew where he was likely to have been buried, and she showed us to what remained of a road that would take us right to the place, not three miles from where we stood. The road was overgrown, but as you walked along you could see the ruts. The brush grew lower in them, because the earth was still packed so hard. We walked past that graveyard twice. The two or three headstones in it had fallen over and it was all grown up with weeds and grass. The third time, my father noticed a fence post, so we walked over to it, and we could see a handful of graves, a row of maybe seven or eight, and below it a half row, swamped with that dead brown grass. I remember that the incompleteness of it seemed sad to me. In the second row we found a marker someone had made by stripping a patch of bark off a log and then driving nails partway in and bending them down flat so they made the letters REV AMES. The R looked like the A and the S was a backward Z, but there was no mistaking it.

It was evening by then, so we walked back to the lady's farm and washed at her cistern and drank from her well and slept in her hayloft. She brought us a supper of cornmeal mush. I loved that woman like a second mother. I loved her to the point of tears. We were up before daylight to milk and cut kindling and draw her a bucket of water, and she met us at the door with a breakfast of fried mush with blackberry preserves melted over it and a spoonful of top milk on it, and we ate standing there at the stoop in the chill and the dark, and it was perfectly wonderful.

Then we went back to the graveyard, which was just a patch of ground with a half-fallen fence around it and a gate on a chain weighted with a cowbell. My father and I fixed up the fence as best we could. He broke up the ground on the grave a little with his jackknife. But then he decided we should go back to the farmhouse again to borrow a couple of hoes to make a better job of it. He said, "We might as well look after these other folks while we're here." This time the lady had a dinner of navy beans waiting for us. I don't remember her name, which seems a pity. She had an index finger that was off at the first knuckle, and she spoke with a lisp. She seemed old to me at the time, but I think she was just a country woman, trying to keep her manners and her sanity, trying to keep alive, weary as could be and all by herself out there. My father said she spoke as if her people might be from Maine, but he didn't ask her. She cried when we said goodbye to her, and wiped her face with her apron. My father asked if there was a letter or a message she would like us to carry back with us and she said no. He asked if she would like to come along, and she thanked us and shook her head and said, "There's the cow." She said, "We'll be just fine when the rain comes."

That graveyard was about the loneliest place you could imagine. If I were to say it was going back to nature, you might get the idea that there was some sort of vitality about the place. But it was parched and sun-stricken. It was hard to imagine the grass had ever been green. Everywhere you stepped, grasshoppers would fly up by the score, making that snap they do, like striking a match. My father put his hands in his pockets and looked around and shook his head. Then he started cutting the brush back with a hand scythe he had brought, and we set up the markers that had fallen over--most of the graves were just outlined with stones, with no names or dates or anything on them at all. My father said to be careful where I stepped. There were small graves here and there that I hadn't noticed at first, or I hadn't quite realized what they were. I certainly didn't want to walk on them, but until he cut the weeds down I couldn't tell where they were, and then I knew I had stepped on some of them, and I felt sick. Only in childhood have I felt guilt like that, and pity.

The prose reminds me of Harold Bell Wright, who also wrote in a similar genre. The passage that you selected was very gripping! I could almost imagine myself in the cemetery with them...

Gee, Erin, that sounds quite good and the bit you quoted was pretty compelling. I will be sure to add it to my already large list of books I need to read. Thanks for calling it to my attention!

Thanks for the pointer, Erin. I have been casting about for something new to read, and this looks to be it.