Guess what the background is
Author: Marilynne Robinson
Publication: 2004
Genre: Historical fiction
Oof. Nope. Nope nope nope. This has been on my periphery for years and it’s difficult to tell if I would have disliked it at any time or it just hit wrong in early 2021. A disorganized collection of ramblings from an old-timey minister waiting to die was not, not, NOT good pandemic reading.
This was such a slim book I was initially convinced I was going to barrel through it in short order, but….nope. I really struggled to make any progress with it. Eventually I accepted that I was going to read it in 10-20 page increments and just let it take however long I needed.
John Ames, the aforementioned minister and pastor of a church in Gilead, Iowa, is writing a letter to his son to read after his death. Ames is dying of an unspecified heart ailment, and as the unnamed son was born late in his life, he won’t have many memories of his father. The narrative then proceeds to traipse about through contemporary happenings, Ames’s own adult life, his father and grandfather’s life, and a whole bunch of drama with his friend and fellow minister’s family. He talks about God a lot and it’s sweet but ultimately rather boring. (If you are Christian you might enjoy this more, perhaps.) Abolition and interracial marriage are in there too, but in a rather unsatisfying white-perspective-focused manner. A lot of the rest of it was awfully melancholy, which was one hundred percent not what I needed in a reading experience right now.
It was also really unclear at times who was doing what, because Ames refuses to name half his characters when he writes about them. His father and grandfather get no names, his son doesn’t get a name, and his wife only gets a name through a different character’s dialogue towards the end of the book. His wife comes nowhere near being fully realized as a character, presenting as something of a shy lost soul that he rescued from sin. ‘Kay. I have to wonder how much of this is intentional – Robinson deliberately showing the weaknesses of one elderly person’s perspective. I’m not sure. I do know that I would have rather heard more from the other characters in the mix – but not so much that I’m going to pick up Robinson’s other novels to look for them.
One bit of text I did appreciate and set aside (paraphrased here): The inadequacy of your concepts has nothing to do with the reality of the situation. May we all remember that.