Set aside the idea that “Housekeeping,” Marilynne Robinson’s groundbreaking 1980 debut novel, should be on anyone’s short list for the Great American Novel.
Forget the fact that her newest work, “Lila,” is the third in a series that began with 2005’s Pulizter-winning “Gilead” and continued with 2008’s “Home.”
It’s just as well to open “Lila” with no preconceptions and just start reading. The pages in this volume are dense, but once you release yourself to Robinson’s rhythms, the rewards are profound and layered, and what was intimidating becomes magnetic.
Set in the fictional town of Gilead, Iowa, “Lila” digs deep into the inner life of Lila Dahl (her name, sort of, though with such a bumpy and tragic childhood it’s hard to say exactly what her real name is), who winds up in Gilead after a series of misadventures that should by rights have broken her.
Gilead still reels from being gutted by the Great Depression when Lila finds the town preacher, the Rev. John Ames, and eventually marries him.
But who is this woman, and where did she come from? Lila, whose mind floats from reality to fantasy in a way that suggests the boundary between the two is much slimmer and more porous than most people find comforting, may not be quite sure herself. But she knows enough to censor herself from telling anyone, least of all the preacher, about the moral challenges she’s faced and the sometimes-destructive choices she’s made. At times she wants to, for the purging, cleansing nature of confession, atonement — though Lila may not have these words at her disposal. Her awareness of the way of things is unique to her; on one page she’s didactic and assured, on the next she’s self-serving and brutal. She is a survivor, comfortably uncomfortable in her lot.
The ideas of God, of morality, of Christianity all weigh on uneducated Lila, and her sometimes-exacting, sometimes-ambiguous take on the world and the people in it force the Rev. Ames into a deeper dissection of right and wrong and whether there’s much difference between them.
Spiritual themes have long been central to Robinson’s work, but she presupposes nothing about her reader; even an agnostic can appreciate the depth and vigor and roundabout nature of the search for meaning in these pages. While Lila struggles to find a foothold in tiny Gilead, she looks for clues, wondering in her own way: Are we our histories, good and/or bad? Can we project a future? Do we know what the present means? What matters, and why?
“He told her that the moon is much closer than the sun, falling stars aren’t really stars. She and Mellie had wondered about those things, why some stars came unstuck and the others didn’t, where they landed when they fell, whether all of them would fall down sometime, even the moon. It was nice to be talking about the stars. She could hardly think of them apart from the sound of cicadas and the smell of damp and clover, whispering with Mellie because they should have been asleep. Children come up with these notions, and then after a while they forget to wonder about it all, because what does it matter, what does it have to do with them, things are what they are.”
Robinson has created a work in “Lila” that’s both old-fashioned and contemporary. Timeless. “Lila,” though just now hitting the shelves, has already been long-listed for a National Book Award. This is familiar territory for the award-winning Robinson, and no surprise.
Lila told the child, “The world has been here so long, seems like everything means something. You’ll want to be careful. You practically never know what you’re taking in your hand.”
FICTION: INNER JOURNEY
INNER JOURNEY
Lila
by Marilynne Robinson (Farrar Strauss Giroux)
