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J.A. Gray has far and away the most perceptive review I\u2019ve seen of Marilynne Robinson\u2019s Gilead <\/i> in the March issue of First Things <\/i> . Gray attends to the gaps and reticence of the narrator, John Ames, pointing out that Ames never mentions the name of his young son, to whom the whole book is addressed, or his second wife, and that Ames leaves hints that his congregation never accepted his second marriage and that he might be secretly, unconsciously relieved \u201cthat he will not be there to wound his son or to suffer the wounds that sons can inflict on fathers.\u201d He also challenges the widespread impression that Robinson\u2019s book is plotless: \u201cthere is no shortage of faught and suspenseful episodes, including murder, religious terrorism, apostasy, fornication, child abandonment, and secret miscegenation.\u201d The apparent plotlessness comes not from the lack of incident, but from Ames\u2019 tendence to \u201csay most where he says least. So obliquely and unemphatically are the deepest wounds divulged \u2013 his grandfather\u2019s commission of a gratuitous and monstrous sin against Ames\u2019 ten-year-old father, and Ames\u2019 father\u2019s loss of his religious faith (abetted, unhappily, by Ames himself) \u2013 that a reader who blinks may miss them.\u201d Gray\u2019s review provokes perseverance in flagging readers, and encourages re-reading for those who have finished the book but missed the layers. It is the best kind of review: Not a substitute for the book, but a nudge to the reader to read once again, more attentively. <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
J.A. Gray has far and away the most perceptive review I\u2019ve seen of Marilynne Robinson\u2019s Gilead in the March issue of First Things . Gray attends to the gaps and reticence of the narrator, John Ames, pointing out that Ames never mentions the name of his young son, to whom the whole book is addressed, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature"],"yoast_head":"\n