HOME

OK, it took me forever, but it's fitting that I finished the new Marilynne Robinson novel, "Home," just before the holidays. One, because, not to sound corny, but a novel by Robinson is a gift; she's 65 and has written only three. Two, because this is the time of year when I most strongly feel the pull (or maybe, more precisely, the push) of family and home.

All of Robinson's novels are about family. "Housekeeping," her first, is about an eccentric household of women. "Gilead," her second, written 24 years later, is about an elderly minister and his young second family. "Home" is about a different elderly minister and two of his children, a dutiful daughter and a prodigal son.

I find them fascinating partly because they are not subjects that I personally would explore as a writer — family connections are not as interesting to me as chosen connections — and yet I see so much in her familial observations that makes me pause with wonder and recognition.

Like, in "Home," where a grown man says to his father: "I don't know why I am what I am. I'd have been like you if I could."

Ordinary words that are stunning in their context — the completely satisfying explanation of a mystery by a mystery.

Robinson's grasp of family, and the language she uses in its service, is equal to Shakespeare's. I was delighted to see a humble nod in "Home" to the beautiful lines from "King Lear": "we that are young/shall never see so much, nor live so long."

I had been thinking Robinson's old men were Lear-like, oddly minus the tragic flaws.

Her families live in small towns, where the domestic drama is heightened by the repetition of days, by the lack of distraction. The town described in "Housekeeping" could be all of them: "Fingerbone was never an impressive town. It was chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere."

All of her novels, the latter two explicitly, are about religion, about which she writes with a complexity — and simplicity — reminiscent of the Bible itself. I was always a big believer in the beauty, if not the literal truth, of the Christ story, but I never comprehended the poignancy of Christianity until I read "Gilead." I was familiar with the notion of "ecstasy," the visceral, passionate grasp of Christ, so prevalent in Western, Catholic art, but it was Robinson's homey Protestant tale set in Iowa that made me truly understand the awe — and, in a way, the irrelevance of literal truth. As the narrator of "Gilead" says, "It seems to me that when something really ought to be true then it has a very powerful truth."

Robinson's mastery of story-telling seems one-and-the-same with her spiritual understanding. In "Home," she describes a minister's work as "parsing the broken heart of humankind." But that's the work of a writer, too.

"Home" was the most difficult for me. It is intensely quiet and repetitive, and I didn't have the biblical knowledge to truly appreciate the prodigal son story. The breathtaking beauty of "Gilead's" language becomes more subdued and less elegiac here. We don't have the deeply affecting intimacy of the second-person narrator. At times I'd go for days without picking up "Home," and still I feel it as something to be reckoned with. I don't fully understand the meaning of this book now, but I have this strange faith that I will — like something will happen to me some day and I'll completely, suddenly understand this book.

Robinson has a character in "Home" who's a former teacher. She thinks back on her classroom days and her students:

Why do we have to read poetry? Why "Il Penseroso"? Read it and you'll know why. If you still don't know, read it again. And again. Some of them took the things she said to heart, as she had done once when they were said to her. She was helping them assume their humanity.

Which is exactly what Robinson does for us.