Christiallily alld Litemlure Vol. 59, No.2 (Willter 20/0)

Loyalty Meets Prodigality: The Reality of Grace in Marilynne Robinson's Fiction

Rebecca M. Painter

There is something about certainty that makes Christ ianity un-Ch rist ian .... I have cultivated uncertainty, which I consider a form of reverence.

-Marilynne Robinson, "Credo"

Mari lynne Robinson's novels offer seasoned contemporary explorations of the mysteries of scripture, by means of characters who embody nuanced variations on bibli cal roles. Such characters deepen our appreciation of the mystery of grace as they exhibit striking dimensions of loyalty as well as prodigality. Robinson's fiction uncovers the inner workings of mind and spirit with convincing displays of religious thinking and struggle, veiled hypocrisy, individual dignity, courtesy, sympathy, and grace.

The essay "Family" from Robinson's 11te Death of Adam: Essays 011 Modem 71!OlIglIl (1998) equates love with loyalty, declaring loyalty to be not only "the antidote to fear, distrust, [and] self-interest" but also "[tlhe balm for fai lure or weakness" (89). Inlhe absence ofloyally, "all attempts to prop the family economically or morally or through education or otherwise will fail. The real issue is, will people shelter and nourish and humanize one another? This is creative work, requiring discipl ine and imagination" (89). Robinson's novelistic endeavors take up this challenge. Here we focus on her creation of modern versions of Ruth and the Prodigal Son, whose stories compel readers to contemplate the realities of loyalty, prodigality, and grace through a lens of reverent uncertainty.

Robinson's now-classic Housekeeping (1980) eludes categorization, though a typical literary source claims that the novel "represents a feminist revision of patriarchal traditions ... that suggests that freedom can be found through nonconformity and transience" (Witalec). The firs t line, "My name is Ruth" (3), invites comparison to the Bible's Book of Ruth, about a non-

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Hebrew widow who, rather than returning to her own people after the death of her husband, chooses to remain with Naomi, her Hebrew mother-in-law. The story has key uncertainties: whether Ruth had a caring family to return to, a rationale (or her loyalty to Naomi, whether she had any attraction to the propertied older man she marries at Naomi's behest, bearing a son to carry on her deceased husband's name. Robinson's narrative is far more detailed, exploring depths of female loyalty in response to loss by death as well as abandonment. Ruth Foster, who narrates HOllsekeeping, is unmarried with a multi-layered history of traumatic family deaths and separations, bonds broken and unbroken. She chooses to follow a wandering aunt who belongs to a nameless tribe of transients who stand for all descendants of Cain. The loneliness and isolation this novel depicts has a prodigality of its own.

Ruth and her sister Lucille were orphaned when their mother, Helen, drove off a cliff into the deep watcrs of Lake Fingerbone in the American Northwest ' that had earlier claimed their grandfather. They were raised by their widowed grandmother, Sylvia, until her death, then briefly by Sylvia's two elderly sisters-in-law, who advertised to locate the girls' married aunt, Sylvie Fisher. When Sylvie returns, husbandless, to take care of her nieces, she has spent years as a transient and seems drawn back from her vagabond life not by preference but by family loyalty. Keeping house does not come easily to Sylvie, but she assures Ruth and Lucille that she will not abandon them.

Uncertainty reigns nevertheless. Sylvie occasionally disappears into the uninhabited woods across the lake, where she feels the spirits of lost children; she keeps time solely by train schedules and serves the girls haphazard dinners in the dark. Exasperated with Sylvie's erratic care, Lucille moves in with her home economics teacher, determined to fit in at school and make new friends. The bereft Ruth, who dislikes school and lacks a strong sense of self, stays with Sylvie and adopts her habits- evidently not out of enjoyment or a desire for freedom but out of fealty and compassion. When well-meaning church women and the sheriff intervene 10 try to save Ruth from SylVie's influence, Sylvie responds with intense conviction: "Families should stay together. They should. There is no otber help. Ruthie and [ have trouble enough with the ones we've lost already" (186).

Sensing that authorities will separate them, Sylvie and Ruth set fire to their house and escape at night across the railroad bridge that SpatlS Fingcrbonc Lake. Thc town paper assumes they have drowned, but Ruth's narration mcntions subsequent short -term jobs and alludes to their life

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together traveling by train. Our impression that Sylvie and Ruth survived their escape becomes less certain near the end, when Ruth imagines Lucille inhabiting the family house as ifit hadn't burnt down, saying that if Lucille was there, she and Sylvie have "stood outside her window a thousand times;' thrown the side door open, brought in leaves, tipped over the bud vase like ghosts, and left behind "a strong smell of lake water" (2 18). Expressing Ruth's desire to reunite with lost family members, the author leaves Ruth and Sylvie's mortality suspended, in favor of characterizing a prodigal, unworldly form ofloyalty.

Uncertainty also hovers over the critical reception of this novel. Many perceive Ruth and Sylvie's night passage on foot across the lake on a wind-blown railroad trestle as an assertion of female self-sufficiency and mystical release from bondage to earthly desires and ambitions.l Others find this interpretation troubling, one remarking that "by novel's end Ruth is obsessed with images of death, coldness, and darkness that make claims about her "social fulfillment especially dubious," and that the narrative is "deeply rooted in the trauma of abandonment" (Caver 112).3

Certainly death, loss, and abandonment are traumatic, and escape into an imaginary world does not constitute genuine healing. But for some, the possibility of transcendence and an end to spiritual homelessness, suggested by the ending of HOllsekeeping, points to a trestle of hope over dark waters. "In the universe that is the knowledge of God;' Robinson asserts elsewhere, "opposed beliefs can be equally true, and ... complementary because contradiction and anomaly are the effect of our very limited understanding" ("Credo" 23). This lens might be applied to the above critical disagreements over Housekeepillg, though the novel leaves questions unresolved about the limits of loya lty. More certain is Robinson's achievement in giving richly imagined life to a modern figure of Ruth, one that plumbs the depth of bonds transfigured by great loss. Ruth, traumatized though she may be, declares that despite the lake's absorption of her grandfather and her mother, "There is remembrance, and communion, altogether human and unhallowed. For families will not be broken .... Memory is the sense ofioss, and loss pulls us after it. God Himselfwas pulled after us into the vortex we made when we fell, or so the story goes. And while He was on earth He mended families" (194).

In TIle Death of Adam, Robinson broadens her perceptions of nature, loyalty, family, and other biblical themes first enunciated in Housekeeping, then in Mother COllntry: Brita;'l, the Welfare State and Nuclear Polllltion

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(1989).~ Science, she asserts, can not generate ethics or morality; it "can give us no reason ... to choose honorable poverty over fraudulent wealth],] ... no grounds for preferring what is excellent over what is sensationalist ic. And that is more or less where we are now" (Adam 71 ).s In the essay "Facing Reality" Robinson expresses her distaste for the idea of an all-important Reality derived from notions of objectivity and character, and implications of science that arc a hundred years out of dale. She feels "smothered by this collective fiction, this Reality," in which fear becomes the key to our interpretation of history and experience, and the ugly and the sinister become more real than the reasonable and the good ... "(77). The essays in 111e Death of Adam arc harbingers of Robinson's later fiction, surpassing in (lower-case) realism the style and tone of her first novel.

Demonstrating how a good person could be rea listically portrayed, Gilead (2004) conveys the end-of-life ruminations of a clergyman, who in the jaded notion of "Reali ty" that repels Robinson, would be the dullest of characters or the ri pest fo r lampoo ning. As if to counte rba lance a "collect ive fiction [that] is relentlessly this-worldly, valUing success above all" (84), she sit uates the narrator-protagonist, a preacher who has never sought worldly success, in a small prairie town in the mid-1950s. Reverend John Ames is 76 and dying of angina pectoris. After a long ministry that makes him almost secure in the sincerityofh is consc ience, he spends h is last days writ ing a long letter to his seven-year-old son who will grow up not knOWing him. Writ ing what he calls an "experiment in candor," Ames struggles overtly with having to leave the life he lovcs, his wife, and child, the jewels of his old agc. A more covert conflict is waged within his conscience. Though a Congregationalist minister, Ames can hardly bring himself to forgive his godson, John Ames (Jack) Boughton, for d isgracing his name and the familyofh is closest friend, Robert Boughton, a Presbyterian minister. Ames' virtue is salvaged largely because of his openness to the uncertainty of his knowledge of others, Jack in pa rt icular.

Gilead appears to answer a need Robinson expressed in "Facing Reality:' whe re she observed that polls indicated that most Americans believe in God, but the nature of this belief has "dropped Ollt of the cultural conversation" (Adam 86). People seem to define themselves more as consumers, patients, or members of interest groups, she observes. " If we do still believe in the seriousness of being human, while we have lost the means of acknowledging this belief, even in our thoughts, then profound anxiety ... seems to me an inevitable consequence. And this may account for both the narrowness and

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the intensity of the fiction [of Real ity[ that contains us" (Adal1l 86). As an example of someone entirely serious about being human and fully aware of the mysterious and demanding nature of God, it would be difficult to outdo Rev. Ames, who encounters a hauntingly credible prodigal son who challenges his moral seriousness.

In Home (2008) we experience the equally believable, salty piety of Jack's sister Glory, whose whole nature seems to illustrate Robinson's assertion that "things differ by the measure of their courage and their honesty and thei r largeness of spirit, and ... the difference is profoundly one of value" (Adam 85). Both novels expose depths of home spun discipline and imagination made poignant by their characters' awareness of biblical precepts. They pose an antidote to Robinson's perception that "something has passed out of the culture, changing it invisibly and absolutely ... there are too few uses for words like humor, pleasure, and charm: courage, dignity, and graciollsness; learnedness, fa irmindedness, open-handedness; loyalty, respect, and good faith" (Adam 106). As they transform and expand the parable of the Prodigal Son, the novels arc graced with the aforementioned quali ties, while exposing major threats against them within SOCiety's heart. Set in 1956, before American society was totally immersed in television and other electronic media, these companion novels speak for Robi nson's concern that harsh economic theories and the dehumanizing constraints of "Widget manufacture" have jeopardized our chances at freedom and happiness, experiences that might include "a long supper with our children, a long talk with a friend, a long evening with a book" (Adam 106).

Gilead's narrative becomes a prayer of self-scrutiny, a time capsu le of fatherly wisdom, a plainspoken treat ise on the difficulty of virtue within the most sincere moral consciousness. It can also be seen as a religious epistle in the lineage of SI. Paul's letters, a distinctly American contribution to modern theology. The novel animates a thought Robinson expresses in 111e Death of Adam:

We have forgotten solace. Maybe the saddest family. properly understood, is a miracle of solace .... Imagine that someone failed and disgrace came back to his family, and they grieved with him, and took his sadness upon themselves, and sat down together to ponder the deep mysteries of human life. This is more human and beautiful, I propose, even if it yields no dulling of pain, no patching of injuries. Perhaps it is the calling of some families to console, because intr3ct3ble grief is visited upon them. (90)

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Before the prodigal son appears in Gilead, we read of Ames' father and grandfather, also named John Ames, who ministered to the same small Congregationalist church in Iowa. Both served as chaplains in the Civil War- the older, a fiery abolitionist who shot a man to protect an escaping John Brown, and who seemed to converse directly with God; the younger an adamant pacifist who considered his father's act of violence a betrayal of his ministry. The three generations of Ames clergymen harken to times in American history when people put into practice their understanding of biblical virtues. Ames' forefathers' stories prepare us for the poignancy of Jack's return to Gilead and presage the stronger empathic bond he finally establishes with his godfather.

The novel then tracks Ames' reactions to Jack's return after 20 years, his resentment and distrust of one whose childhood was spent escaping from school, lifting (and later returning) small items of personal importance to Ames, and discovering an addiction to alcohol. Most galling to Ames is Jack's fathering a child at 19 with an underage, disadvantaged girl, refusing to take responsibility. Ames lost the wife of his youth and infant daughter in childbirth and spent 40 years a solitary widower, suppressing his envy of happy families like the Bough tons with their eight children.

Ames' late marriage to Lila, a woman of approximately Jack's age, has brought him unexpected joy, jealously guarded in Jack's casco When Jack first appears in his church, Ames launches into a vindictive sermon on Abraham, Ishmael, and the sins offathers who abandon their children. This event is given greater poignancy in Home, where readers are apprised of the courage Jack has had to muster, with reinforcement from his sister Glory, to attend the service. The effect on Jack is enough, in his terms, to break bones (206). Rev. Boughton had hoped Ames would give Jack a warm welcome and confides to Glory his deep disappointment that Ames has never shown a loving concern for his godson. This episode exposes one of Robinson's compelling variations on the Prodigal Son parable: instead of God as the symbolic fathe r who receives his wayward son, she presents two earthly fathers devoted to serving God but failing to show mercy when it is due. Rev. Boughton's lack of mercy congeals later.

This failing is underlined when Ames and Boughton arc confronted with Jack's seriousness about the Calvin ist doctrine of predestination. The same conversat ion appears in Home, from Glory's perspective, with identical import. One critic describes it as Jack's "patently seeking theological justification for his own moral lassitude" (Meaney 83). This view overlooks

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Jack's remarkable concern, as a non-believer, for the possibility that he might be one of those "who are simply born evil, live evil lives, and then go to hell;> or whether his father and godfather believe that "a good person will go to hell simply because he was consigned to hell from the beginning" (150). It is a classic example of theological certainty coming up against the uncertainty of human conduct. In both novels, the two clergymen avoid a straight answer, until the normally reticent Lila Ames-whose own history of sorrow is etched in her face but never detailed-ends the stalemate. She asserts qUietly but firmly: ''A person can change. Everything can change." Jack thanks her, saying "That's alii wanted to know" (153). Walking home from the Boughtons, Mrs. Ames lells her husband thai Jack "was only asking a question:' adding, "Maybe some people aren't so comfortable with themselves:' which Ames reasonably interprets as a rebuke (154). He later muses, "[W]hen we think we arc protecting ourselves, we are struggling against our rescuer:' but admits that he does not know "how to live by it for even a day, or an hour" (154). The best he can do is remind himself that "the grace of God is sufficient to any transgression, and that to judge is wrong, the origin and essence of much error and cruelty" (155). The narrative probes the reality of this item of faith.

Ames informs his son that Jack's youthful offense was against a }'ounggirl of a "desolate, even squalid" family situation, with "none of the protections a young girl needs." He remarks, " It was something no honorable man would have done" (156). Nowhere in the two novels is there an attempt to justify Jack's transgression. What clouds his perception is Ames's next remark: "Sinners are not all dishonorable people .... But those who are dishonorable never really repent and never really reform" (157). If it were not for his loyalty to scripture, we see that Ames would be dangerously attached to his conviction that there is "no help for a dishonorable person"( 157). therefore no need to forgive him.6 What invokes the gift of uncertainty is his own memory of prodigality.

With subtle precision, Robinson depicts the progression of Ames' moral consciousness by means of his memory of how the boy's mother first came into his life. He likens Lila's appearance in his church on Pentecost with how she impassioned and renewed his life and ministry at age 67. Inscribing his experience of the humbling, death -like passion that overcame him, Ames achieves a deeper cognition of loyalty:

If I had had this experience earlier in life, I would have been much wiser, much more compassionate. I really didn't understand what it was

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that made people who came to me so indifferent to good judgment, to common sense .... And I know now that it is passion that moves them to their prodigal renunciations. I might seem to be comparing something great and holy with a minor and ordinary thing, that is, love of God with mortal1ove. Bull just don't see them as separate things at all. If we can be divinely fed with a morsel and divinely blessed with a touch, then the terrible pleasure we find in a particular face can certainly instruct us in the nature of the very grandest love. (Gilead 204)

Seeing this complete stranger, much younger, probably married, he felt for the first time in his life "snatched out of my character, my calling, my reputation:' given a "foretaste of death .... And why should thai seem strange? 'Passion' is the word we use, after all" (205). Ames' lender memory of the woman he would marry contrasts harshly with his thoughts about Jack. Referring to the loss of his first wife and child, Ames writes: ""nlat one man should lose his child and the next man should just squander his fatherhood as if it were nothing-well, that does not mean that the second man has transgressed against the firs!. I don't forgive [Jack]. I wouldn't know where to begin" (164). It does not occur to Ames that Jack's impish behavior as a boy may have been attempts to establish a bond or at least elicit his attention. He recalls the boy listening raptly as his father and Ames talked on the porch, "and from time to time he would look up at me and smile, as if we were in on a joke together, some interesting conspiracy. I found thai extremely irritating .... [Wlhen th e business with the young girl came up, I was chiefly struck by the meanness of it" (184). Thus far Ames' mindset has precluded compassion toward Jack, but the mingling of prodigal passion and loyalty to his belief in forgiveness has begun. Ames is honest enough to admit his fear that Jack will take over his family after his death and harm them somehow.

Tellingly, it takes the length of the novel for an essent ially kind and virtuous man to reevaluate his judgment of the godson who might have relieved Ames of some of his own loneliness, and whose transgressions might have been mitigated by a more loving bond with his godfather. Ames' story suggests that before forgiveness can occur, the part more capable of self-discernment needs to reexamine old forms of certainty. Loyalty, in other words, must be to truth rather than self. Before Ames is ready to hear what Jack has experienced in the past twenty years, it seems he mllst first cleanse his psyche of the bitterness he felt becoming Jack's godfather. Ames' reconsideration of this event may constitute the revelatory peripeteia

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for Gilead, and perhaps for Home as well, throwing into suspicion and uncertainty the aura of perdition thai Jack has felt virtually since birth-or since his baptism.

Early on Ames recorded tbe joy he always felt in the act of baptizing, which he first performed as a child on a litter of kittens. In Jack's case, however, he felt extreme discomfort. In the christening ceremony, when Rev. Ames asked Rev. Boughton the name he wished his son to have, he froze when he heard his friend say, "John Ames." There was weeping in the pews and tears on Boughton's face, but Ames confesses: "I thought , This is flO/ my child-which 1 truly had never thought of any child before. I don't know exactly what covetise is, but in my experience it is not so much desiring someone else's virtue or happiness as rejecting it , taking offense at the beauty of it" (188). Embittered at the loss of his own wife and child, Ames took offense at his friend's generosi ty, and Jack's baptism was perhaps compromised. Though Ames does not consider it, his reflection begs the question of whether his bitterness had somehow cast a pall over the life of his godson and contributed to Jack's sense of perdition.

Liberated by his own candor, Ames now feels that Jack Boughton is indeed his son: "By 'my son' I mean another self, a more cherished self" (189). The fulfillment of Ames' desire for another chance to christen Jack

fore~lightens the conclusion of this narrative, an illustration of grace received by Ames as well as Jack. Seeing Jack with new eyes, Ames wishes he could "forget all the tedious particulars and just feel the presence of his mortal and immortal being:' to "sit at th e feet of that eternal soul and learn" (197). Ames gets this wish as well, as he accepts the moral precept of respect for the Other, the unfathomable spirit of fr iend or enemy whom chance or providence makes our neighbor?

When Jack finally reveals to Rev. Ames that he has a wife, Della. and a son nearly the same age as Ames' boy, Ames realizes that Jack too has experienced a prodigal passion. He has had a loving but tragically obstructed marriage with an African American woman, a schoolteacher whose father is also a clergyman. Laws forbidding interracial marriage have prevented their union from being legalized or financially stable. They've been devoted to one another eight years, but able to live together only "seventeen months, Iwo weeks, and a day" (Gilead 220). Della's family has never accepted him, not because he is white but because he-at the cost of their approval-was honest about lacking faith. The more obvious element of racism in Gilead and Home should not distract readers from the novels' exposure of the insidious bias of believers toward non-believers.

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While Della's family is lining up a black man willing to marry her and adopt their son, Jack has come home to ascertain the possibility of making a life in Gilead with Della- Iowa then being one of only three slates lacking anti-miscegenation laws. Unprepared to find his father so near death, he asks if Ames thinks his old friend is too frail to hear his story. Tactlessly, Ames assures Jack that his father was very taken with his first child and would most likely welcome his second. After some Simi larl y excruciating repartee, Ames puts his arm around Jack and says he is a good man. Jack, who has spent len years in prison, I I laughs, saying, "YOLI can take my word for it, Reverend, there are worse" (23\). Inquiring whether Ames could use his influence to help him settle with his family in Gilead, Ames answers frankly that he might not live long enough. "No matter, Papa;' Jack replies. "I believe I've lost them, anyway" (232). He suspects-apparently verified in Home-that Della has succumbed to family pressure and broken oR' with him. Deeply moved, Ames writes to his son that he has overlooked pastoral discretion to divulge Jack's story, so he could "see the beauty there is in him" (232). Looking out on his congregation the following Sunday, where Jack is sitting next to Mrs. Ames and their son, Ames finds himself wishing there were grounds for his old dread: "J

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if I never found you, my comfort would be in ... my lonely and singular hope, which could not exist in the whole of Creation except in my heart and in the heart of the Lord .... [Jack] would utterly and bitterly prefer what he had lost to everything they had. (Gilead 237-38)

The Reverend's trust in the prodigality of divine compassion-even at the expense of marriage vows-takes the Prodigal Son story into territory that reverberates with Aquinas' view that true knowledge of God begins when we realize that we cannot know Him. "There is no justice in love," Ames asserts, "no proportion in it, and there need not be, because ... it is only a glimpse or parable oJ an embracing, incomprehensible reality ... the eternal breaking in 011 the temporal. So how could it subordinate itself to cause or consequence?" (238). Ames' reflection on the prodigality of passion enables him to reassure Jack that he truly understands why he has to leave, making him more loyal to his godson than is Jack's father. As Ames blesses Jack he finds himself wondrously grateful for all his "old bitterness of heart" (240).9

Seeing Jack at the bus stop, Ames gives Jack his dog-eared copy of Ludwig Feuerbach's TIle Essence o/Christianity (1841). Jack laughs and says he remembers it "from-forever!" (239). Ames drolly thinks it must have been one of the items Jack had pilfered and returned in his youth, so in that way it might belong to him already. How generous the Reverend has become with his prized possessions, when spiritual ownership is at stake! Hen marked a passage for Jack: "Only that which is apart from my own being is capable of being doubted by me. How then can I doubt of God, who is my being?" In the outpouring of Ames' heart, so much for Jack's fruitless search for faith. 10 In the exquisite scene of his farewell blessing, Ames finishes a traditional prayer that the Lord be gracious to him and give him peace, but Jack leaves his head resting on Ames' hand. This moves Ames to continue, asking that Jack be blessed as a "beloved SOil and brother and husband and father" (Gilead 241). He tells Jack it is an honor to bless him, writing that he would have gone through seminary, ordination, and all his years of ministry for that one moment (242). Rev. Ames has, in effect, re-baptized his namesake as he sets out in abject sorrow and hopeless bravery for a life without those he cherishes. Jack's is a living death, while heart disease will soon force Ames to leave the world and family he dearly loves. Of the two men, the one without faith has met greater injustice. Ames has been soothed by the balm of Gilead, lOVing the place so much that he considers being buried in its soil his "last wild gesture of love" (247). The prodigal has sought its balm almost in vain, and cannot come home to stay. II

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More than any character, Glory Boughton signifies Robinson's important recasting of the Prodigal SOil siory. Her perspective frames the narrative of Home, providing a glimpse of how we might address some of the homclcssncss of the Jacks among us. Glory inhabits what Robinson has called the "real issue" of loyalty, whether people will "shelter and nourish and humanize onc another" (Adam 89), The real-ness of Jack's awkward but genui ne rapport with his youngest sister is perhaps the novel's mosl extraordinary feature, that and her dry wit and endless loyalty to those she loves.

AI thirty-eight Glory has come home to take care of their father, humiliated by a long engagement to a man who finally admitted to being married, haVing consumed her life savings. Without her deep sense of shame and failure, one doubts whether Jack would be able to divulge some of his most guarded thoughts and details of his troubled life. '2 Glory's accOLlnt of Jack's return to Gilead adds a female dimension lacking in the biblical parable. Her Sisterly devotion to the family's wayward son, refusal to pass judgment, and all-embraCing mercy most resembles the father's unconditional welcome in the original. Glory's loyalty to Jack and her family also makes her the second indelible Ruth figure in Robinson's oeuvre.

Loyalty, however, does not preclude honesty, attested by Glory's gimlet-eyed vision of the Boughton family as "good in fact, but also to be seen as good," with "something disturbingly like hypocrisy;' something "meant only to compensate for Jack, who was so conspic uously not good as to cast a shadow over their household" (Home 6). In Robinson's nuanced variation of the biblical parable, suspicion is cast on the family's righteous attitude toward their sensitive and gifted son that might have alienated him from the beginning. The patriarch's mindset eVidently impinged upon Glory as well. She earned a Master's degree and taught high school English in Des Moines for thirteen years before returning to Gilead but wonders what she has done with her life. She was a good teacher, but now reflects that if shea been a man she might have chosen the ministry. "She seemed always to have known that, to their father's mind, the world's great work was the business of men ... ordained in some reasonably respectable denomination. Women were creatures of a second rank, however piolls, however beloved, however honored" (20). The realization that she has limited herself to her father's unspoken estimation of a daughter's lesser potential becomes "part of the loneliness she felt, as if the sense that everything could have been otherwise were palpable darkness. Darkness visible. lll

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blinkered loyalt y to her father she has denied herself what only seemed like a prodigal ambition.

Glory's candor enriches our understanding of Jack's afflicted youth. She recalls how she and her siblings would run 10 Rev. Ames, their falher's al ler ego, to tell on their "poor scoundrel brother, who knew it, and was irritated and darkly am used, and who ... inspired urgent sllspicions among them which they fe lt they had to pass, whatever their misgivings, to spare their fathe r having to deal with the sheriff again" (5). Their tattling and Jack's alienation made them all feel less than comfortable in their childhood home. In Glory's memory, Jack discerns being unfai rly judged yet is remarkably tolerant of his family's lack of understanding and compassion. Readers may surmise that a few prankish tastes of forbidden liquor triggered Jack's genetic predisposition to alcohol ism. ll

Glory was mystified by Jack's impregnating a poor neighborhood girl near Glory's age, then 15. After heo returned to college, Glory wrote to him, "draw[ing] upon every resource her sixteen~year indoctrination in moral sincerity had conferred on her;' to come home and speak with their fathe r about the child. Perhaps out of respect for her, Jack did come home. When Glory asked ifhe was going to marry the gir\' he went pale.

He smiled-that strange, hard shame of his-and said, "You've seen her:' She said, "Well, what is Papa going to do-" "Do to me? Nothing. I mean, he's going to forgive me:' He laughed. ''And now I have a train to catch." "You won't even stay for supper?" He said, "Poor Pigtails;' and smiled at her and walked out the door. (HOllie 57)

This passage captu res Jack's awareness of guilt and his assumption of at least outward forgiveness on the part of their fatber. But it also reveals his feeling for Glory's loneliness. "Poor Pigtails will be all alone" is what Jack said when her sister Grace was sent to Minneapolis to study music seriously (55), and there were other times Jack was the only family member to extend to her the loyalty of compassion.

The whole matter of loyalty has been confUSing to Glory. As a girl she had not understood, "imbecile as she was with loneliness and youth ... why her father shou ld feel that arrogance had a parI in [Jack's transgression] or cruelty. Or why he whispered those words with such bitter emphasis"

334 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE

(17-18), After all. Jack was the son for whom her father would wait to appear in the pews before beginning his Sunday sermon, his head drooping when Jack did not appear, and perking up whenever he did, his sermon at once focusing on joy and God's goodness regardless of the text. Glory does not decipher this contradiction but provides telling information: Rev. Boughton's insistence on the finest quality shirts, ordered from Chicago and worn with elegant cufflinks, his (and therefore his family's) greater disgust at errors in taste than at breaking the Ten Commandments. Her father's righteous insensitivity emerges when Jack has returned, as they watch the Montgomery race riots on their first television. Appalled at black women and children being fire-hosed, Jack exclaims "Jeslls Ch rist! "; his father takes more offense at Jack's apparent disrespect for the Lord's name, and assures him that the uprising wil! soon be forgotten (HOllie 97). Significantly unlike his old friend, Rev. Ames has inherited his grandfather's concern for racial discrimination and takes Jack's side on the issue.

In James Wood's opinion , Home is powerful precisely because in it Rev. Boughton is not the soft-spoken sage that Rev. Ames is in Gilead. "He is a fierce, stern, vain old man, who wants to forgive his son and cannot. He preaches sweetness and light, and is gentle with Jack, like a chastened Lear ... only to turn on him angrily:' Wood observes, "The novel quietly mobilizes the major Biblical stories of father and son: Esau, denied his birthright, begging for a blessing from his father; Joseph, reunited, finally, with his father, Jacob: the Prodigal Son, most loved because most errant." Wood is especially apt to link Jack's variation of the Prodigal Son story with the denial of Esau's birthright, if we consider as a birthright an unassuming view of one's character. This denial is unveiled in a tormented scene when Jack's father asks him 10 come and hear something he has to say. something that he'll probably have to forgive him for. Jack says he'll try, and the old man leads by claiming he hasn't felt like a good father:

Jack cleared his throat. "I really don't know what to say. I've always thought you were a very good fa ther. Much better than I deser\'ed.~ ... [His father takes Jack's hand and studies his face, laying the hand against his chest.] "You feel that heart in there? My life became your life, like lighting one candle from another. Isn't that a mystery? ... And yet you always did the opposite of what I hoped for, the exact opposite. So J tried not to hope for anything at all, except that we wouldn't lose you. So of course we did. That was the one hope I couldn't put aside."

THE REALITY OF GRACE IN ROBINSON'S FICTION 335

Jack withdrew his hand .... ~11lis is very difficult;' he said. "What can I do- I mean, is there something [ can do now?~ ... "Not a thing to be done. I'm sorry I brought it up .... All that old grief coming back on mc. I'm tired now, though. It scems like J'm always tired." And he settled into his pillows and turned onto his right side, away from Jack, toward the wall. (Home 115-16)

Unfortunately, Rev. Boughton's loyalty appears tethered to himself. Simon Baker sees Boughton as aligning himself with the doctrine of forgiveness "to appear worthier than he actually is:' his outbursts against Jack "accumulat[ing[ into an assassination of character which his son scarcely deserves:' Glory's reverence for her father precludes this accusation, but evidence presented through her eyes supports it.

Glory displays a prodigal compassion for wh ich forgiveness is forgone or moot. She discovers Jack in the garage at a ghastly nadir of his life, after an unsuccessful attempt to kill himself, having received a letter from Della breaking off with him. Glory's tenderness restores her brother to a semblance of dignity- throughout and follOWing about an hour of righteous fury. She bathes him. hides his soi led clothes. shaves him because his hands are trembling, and advises shortening to remove the dark stains from his hands. Their father senses something gone dreadfully wrong, but Glory protects him from that knowledge. Having sent Jack to bed to sleep off his suicidal hangover, she cooks a meal of roast chicken and dumplings to fill the house with aromatic comfort.

Trllsting her kindness, Jack tells Glory he cannot stay while the rest of the family arrives for the death watch. He cannot trust himself not to "do something-unsightly" and make everything much worse, adding softly, "I really can't deal with the thought that he will die" (303). In this version of the story, Glory instantly regrets telling him that leaving now is his masterpiece. She looks into his "pale and regretful" face, realizing that "the grief he always carried with him was as much as he could bear" (303). Later she muses appreciatively that Jack, "God bless him;' had understood the depths of her hopes for children and her longing for her own sun lit home, "that she had been diligent at discerning virtues and suppressing doubts" about her fiance, "ready to give up mere money if it could put aside the obstacles to her happiness .... Jack had understood it all and laughed, a painful bllt companionable laugh, as if they'd been whiling away perdition together telling tales of what got them there, to forestall tedium and the dread of what might come next" (307). With such fellow feeling, forgiveness seems irrelevant.

336 C H RISTIANITY AND liTERATURE

For Glory, perdition is not the final judgment she will face in the afterlife, but the loss of her dreams of a husband and children in this life. What part ially relieves Glory's misery is a testament to her loyalty: the hope, not for her own happiness, but the possibility she will one day prOVide a family refuge, if not for Jack then for his SOil. Glory decides to remain in Gilead because she perceives Ihal Jack values the old homestead enough to have restored its yard and garden to the condition of his you th. She plans to teach school again, keeping the big dark hOllse ready for family visits, however infrequent. This kind ofloyalty has a solitary grace redolent of what Rev. Ames perceived in Jack's abject exh from the family home-guarding a secret of love more precious because it may be lost to the world, saved only in the hearl.

As Jack leaves, Glory observes "a peacefulness about him that came with resignation, with the extinction of that last hope, like a perfect humility undistracted by the possible, the unrealized, the yet to be determined." It resonates wi th her own humble lucidity that "It may have been the saddest day of her life, one of the saddest of his. And yet, all in all , it wasn't a bad day" (309). Hers is a real and homely grace, which could be found in legions of unsung survivors of great loss, nurturers quietly prodigal in sllstaining homes for others, and prodigals who try but cannOI come home. Glory's example is a contemporary re-visioning of the biblical parable that places divine mercy and acceptance in human hands-often female hands at that, an example somewhat lacking in Scripture. \-1

Glory's fealty to Jack imports a potentially slLstaining grace. This reader is grateful that she is nearby in the kitchen when Jack comes to bid his father good-bye, hat in hand. She sees the old man look at him, "stern wi th the effort of attention, or with wordless anger:' As Jack extends his hand, their father draws his own hand back. turning his head away. "Tired of it!" he says. They are the last words Jack will hear from his father, so it is an exquisite act of forgiveness that Jack nods, saying, "Me, too. Bone tired" (317). He stands meekly absorbing the blow, looks at his fathe r fo r a minute, then bends to kiss his brow. It seems profoundly merciful Ihal Jack can retreat from this wrenching scene to the kitchen where his sister weeps, haVing heard everything. He can wipe a tear from her cheek with his thumb and say "So long, kiddo" (317). One hopes Ihal Glory's fierce love for him, the memory of her tears and her command that he must take care of himself, will buffer the terrible impact of Jack's rejection by his father. One suspects that it will, alleast as much as the bleSSing Jack receives from his godfather.

THE REALITY OF GRACE IN ROB INSON'S FICTION 337

It is the alcoholic wanderer, bereft of wife and child, who offers the most compelling example of grace in th is story, matched only by Glory's loyalty to him. Jack. like Rev. Ames, has named his son Robert after his father, and has shown extraordinary tenderness to the old man in his fra il ty. Is he, nevertheless, doomed to perdition? O n the eve of his departure Glory thinks, "If I or my father or any Boughton has ever stirred the Lord's compassion. then Jack will be all right. Because perdition for him would be perdition for everyone of us" (316). Robinson has opined recently in an interview printed in this journal that a good predestinarian would point ou t that Jack cannot know whether he is destined for perdition or whether he will be among those whom God loves no matter what (Robinson, "Further Thoughts" 489). Regarding the seeming d issonance between the concept of free will and the doctrine of predestination, she suggests that free will implies we will be judged on the basis of what we do, and can "at least tentatively judge ourselves and one another;' whereas predestination keeps God's view mysterious, a grace He reserves to Himself. My comments here suggest that Robinson's novels elucidate a conciliatory biblical concept, that we will be judged according to the in tent ions of our heart, known only to God, whose wisdom takes into account our ignorance, illness, selfishness, and bumbling attempls 10 care for others. Withou t sllch fullness of knowledge and compassion. our best perspective is uncertainty. As Glory reflects, "the soul finds its own home if it ever has a home at all" (Home 282). Perhaps most of us will be greeted as prodigals returning from hells of our own making. Among us may be persons like Ruth Foster, Glory, Jack, and the Reverends Ames and Boughton, whom Robinson has gifted us to appreciate the uncertain but real dimensions of prodiga lity, loyalty, and grace.

Marymouflt Manhattan College

NOTES

'Robinson grew up in Idaho. near the vast. deep Lake Coeur d'Alene, which itself has a railroad bridge similar to the one described in Housekeeping.

2Anne-Marie Mallon writes that "Ruth's transience, her realignment with the natural laws of movement and change, has freed her to see that 'what has perished need not be lost: Indeed her whole journey testifies to the truth that death is not the final event and loss is not the final word. Ruth knows that the seeds of resurrection lie in the earth, and she knows that the rragments of every human life, however scattered by the major catastrophes and minor adjustments which are its due, can be remembered [sic] by those who are willing to conjure its presence" (104).

338 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE

lldentifiablc post-traumatic stress reactions might include Sylvia's mute isolation for days after her daughter Helen's suicide, her trance-like repetition of maternal chores as she looks after Ruth and Lucille, having lost her own daughters. Ruth's childhood memories reveal that Helen was abandoned by her husband, and before her suicide was living a bleak, isolated life with her daughters in a city far from Fingerbone. What Ruth describes as her mother's exceptional calm might be seen as a lack of affect resulting from trauma, and her suicide as an expression of despair. In a similar light, Helen's leaving to get married could have been a painful blow that marked the commencement of her sister Sylvie's rootless life and her disconnected personality a response to trauma.

~The mending offamilies, loyalty to family in the midst of uncertainty, in Ruth's mind and Robinson's, is holy. Also holy is the water that embraces death and is necessary for life on the earth it nourishes. The holiness of water and those who drink it leads us to briefly mention Robinson's next work, Motlier Cormtry: Britain, tile Welfare State alld Nuclear Pollution (1989), an impassioned, meticulously referenced critique of Britain's secretive long-term dumping of long-lived radioactive waste on its shores and in neighboring seas. [n it Robinson informs us that the Sellafield nuclear processing plant , jerrybuilt during World War II in the race to build the atom bomb, should have been demolished afterward. Instead it has been kept running purely for government profit, its lethal effects hidden or obscured by secrecy laws. The facility has dumped its wastes into waterways of England's beautiful Lake District and the Irish Sea, endangering countless lives and quite possibly the entire planet. It has been doing this for decades with nary a protest from the United States or other major nalions, several of whom are glad 10 unburden themselves Ofloxic waste that would otherwise pollute their own waters. Of all her more celebrated texts, Robinson consistently claims to be proudest of this volume. In it she avows, "I am angry to the depths of my soul that the earth has been so injured while we were all bemused by supposed monuments of value and intellect. ... The grief borne home to others while I and my kind have been thus occupied lies on my conscience like a crime" (32). With this work the author becomes a contemporary female Noah, warning the world of the dire consequences of their disregard for the waters that may not flood the world so much as poison it with radioactive pollutants. Naming her book Mother COlilltry evokes a historical reverence for England, and displays a Ruth-like loyalty to the earth and to poor people who cannot protest as eloquently or dig up the ominous obscured facts as skillfully. The British government banned publication of the book in the United Kingdom.

~Her concern, expressed in the 1990s, that econom ic value was being created at the cost of just wages for workers and the abuse of natural resources, seems prophetiC: "A global economy organized on these principles will be full of poor, sick, dispirited people, and shoddy goods, since they will be cheapened to suit the dwindling property of the workforce, who are also the buying public. ... Human limits to exploitation of people would solve the problem, but they would also

THE REALITY OF GRACE IN ROBINSON'S FICTION 339

interfere with competition, which is the great law of nature, supposedly, and which therefore functions as a value, because 'science' has supplanted religion"(74).

6'fhe connection between personal and intra national forgiveness appears in Robinson's writings, e.g. in her essay in 71le Detl/il of Adam on Lutheran theologian Dietrich BonhoelTer, murdered by the Nazis a few months before the end of World War II. In it Robinson praises Bonhoeffer'scritique of the self-defeat ing exclusivism of the official church. Advocating a chu rch without boundaries, he predicted, presciently, the eventual disappearance of religion in Europe if those boundaries remained in place. Apparently referring to the war's aftermath but not limited to it, Robinson remarks that "we have not learned the heroic art of forgiveness, which may have been the one thing needful" (III). She states that Bonhoeffer's understanding of the otherness of God was precisely to be found in His boundless compassion, believing that "the failure of the church and the evil of the world are revealed in their perfect difference from this force of forgiveness, which they cannot weary or diminish or evade" ( 110).

7"fhe works of Emanuel Levinas come to mind, among others. 8We are never informed of his crime, but we do learn that Jack has had blackouts

from drinking and may not remember what he did, enough to mention it to Glory, who never asks.

'lNot for nothing have readers of both volumes recommended that those who have not yet read them start with Home and finish with Gilead, as Frank McCourt might say, for the uplift in it.

IOAmes' refusal to condemn Jack's inability to share his family's faith reflects Robinson's admiration, expressed in 71,e Deatll of Adam, for Bonhoeffer's "steadfast refusal to condemn the 'religion less' world, and his visionary certainty that it is comprehended in the divine presence" (124).

IIThere is a quality about lack's sad departure that resists cynicism or nihilism. As Robinson has stated in 711e Death of Adam, cynicism is the great antidote to morality, the understanding of how arbitrary, unpredictable, unenforceable and "insecurely grounded in self-interest" it is (170). While justified, it should not be allowed to descend into nihilism, despite the "amazing wrongness" of the human condition: "ifit is agreed we are in this respect mysterious, then we should certainly abandon easy formulas of judgment" (171).

IlTheir relationship recalls that of Raskolnikov and Sonya in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punisllmellt (1866), wherein another prodigal son can only trust a devout woman who bears an almost equal stigma of shame. It is amusing that Glory tells Jack at one point that he resembles Raskolnikov because he is becoming gaunt, when earlier she'd called him Cary Grant.

ll'J"hough Rev. Boughton has mentioned that drink was the ruination of some of their relatives, the Boughtons, like most of society until recently, seem to have viewed alcoholism as a flaw in character rather than a genetically susceptible disease of the brain, impairing the abili ty of those affiicted to act upon their knowledge of

340 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERAT URE

right conduct. See Enoch Cordis, M.D., ~Imaging and Alcoholism: A Window on the Brain.~

'~For reasons of space, I do not explore the brotherly support attempted and seldom accepted from Jack's older brother Teddy, a physician, who has always cared for and tried to help Jack. This older brother figure is clearly an opposing variation of the biblical parable's jealous and resentful older brother. Though mentioned in passim, Teddy appears in person on ly toward the end of Home, and Jack remains distant and awkward with him, refusing his financial help. Jack does call him, though, to make sure Glory is not left alone when he leaves Gilead.

WORKS CITED

Baker, Simon. "Homeward Bound." Rev. of Home by Marilynne Robinson. TIle Observer,S Oct. 2008. \Veb. 29 Dec. 2008.

Caver, Christine. "Nothing Left To Lose: Housekeep;'lg's Strange Freedoms.~ American Uteralllre68.1 (1996): 111-37.

Gordis, Enoch. "Imaging and Alcoholism: A Window on the Brain." National Ins/illlle Oil Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. April 2000. Web. 22 December 2009.

Mallon, Anne-Marie. "Sojourning Women: Homelessness and Transcendence in Housekeeping." Critique 30.2 (1989): 95-105.

Meaney, Thomas. "In God's Creation:' Rev. of Home by Marilynne Robinson. Commentary Oune 2005): 83.

Robinson, Marilynne. "Credo: Reverence, a Kind of Humility, Corrects Belief's Tendency To Warp or Harden." Harvard Divillity BlIlIetill 36.2 (2008): 22-32.

_. 11le Death of Adam: Essays on Modem TI/OlIght. 1998. New York: Marinerl Houghton Mimin, 2000.

_. "Further Thoughts on a Prodigal Son Who Cannot Come Home, on Loneliness and Grace: An Interview with Marilynne Robinson." Interview by Rebecca M. Painter. Chris/iallity and Literatllre, 58.3 (2009): 484-92.

_. Gilead. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2004. _. Home. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2008. _. HOllsekeeping. New York: Picador, 1980. _. Motller Coulllry: Britai", the Welfare Stale a"d Nuclear Pol/lltio". New York:

Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1989. Wood, James. "The Homecoming: A Prodigal Son Returns in Marilynne

Robinson's Third Nove!." Rev. of Home. Jhe New Yorker. 8 September 2008. Web. 29 Dec. 2008.

Witalec, Janet, cd. "Robinson, Marilynne-Introduclion:' Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 180. Gale Cengage, 2004. eNotes.com. 2006. Web. 20 January 2009.

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Loyalty Meets Prodigality: The Reality of Grace in Marilynne Robinson'sFiction

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