Marilynne Robinson is as revered in literary and intellectual circles as she is in the Iowa City church where she sometimes preachesKevin Van Paassen/The Globe and Mail
There is a tendency among those who have been wronged to assume that the universe has given them something only to take it away. Lila, the eponymous character of Marilynne Robinson's fourth novel, is one such person for whom happiness is a struggle, and Robinson affectingly and tenderly traces her arc from misery to safety, from abandonment to unconditional, familial love. Lila is in part a masterful portrait of a restless woman – a female hobo – and lovers of Robinson's first novel, Housekeeping, may be delighted to find that the author has returned (after over 30 years!) to the topic of itinerant women. Lila is also the backstory of Gilead, Robinson's second novel (Lila is the second wife of the Reverend John Ames, who narrates Gilead in the form of a letter to their seven-year-old son) and a companion to Robinson's third novel, Home, which explores the relationship between the Reverend John Ames's closest friend, the Reverend Robert Boughton, and his two children, Glory and Jack. The three works could be considered a trilogy, though all four novels feel linked, whether by character or theme.
Of all Robinson's works (four novels, four works of non-fiction), Lila is particularly refreshing in this time of almost crazed confessional writing: here are the inner thoughts of a person who would rather not tell all, who would rather be alone than seek company, and who, after much deep reflection and hardship, still has more questions than conclusions.
Born in Idaho in 1943, Marilynne Robinson has an unusual pedigree – she is an award-winning novelist (among many other honours, Gilead won the Pulitzer; Home, the Orange Prize) and a well-respected essayist, writing on topics from the evils of a nuclear reprocessing plant to the (never-ending) conflict between science and religion. The unusual part is that Robinson is a devout Christian – a Calvinist. When I was a student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where Robinson has taught since 1991, she was offering a course on the Bible. She would first read us the scripture in Hebrew, then quibble over the Latin and Greek, and finally, refute (at least partly) what was printed in our Oxford versions. In many ways, it was a class on the difficulties of translation, with the Bible as an example text, and I mention it only to illustrate that the breadth of her knowledge (and her faith) is astonishing. Indeed, she is as revered in literary and intellectual circles as she is in the Iowa City church where she sometimes preaches.
Written in one long chapter, Lila begins in almost Dickensian gloom: a little girl sits alone in the dark on a cold stoop, the house behind her full of "people sleeping right on the floor, in some old mess of quilts and gunnysacks." It is the 1920s. Filthy and neglected, the girl is snatched by a well-meaning drifter named Doll and spends her childhood as a migrant worker, learning to live off the land: "She knew how to get by so long as nobody bothered her. Plenty of fish in the river. There were dandelion greens. Mushrooms. You can chew pine sap if you want to. You can eat the roots of things." It is Lila and Doll against the world, a timeless landscape in which there were no "other names for seasons than planting and haying." When Lila learns that they live in the United States of America, Doll quips, "Well, I spose they had to call it something."
The two roam the Dust Bowl in a pack led by a man named Doane: they "walk south ahead of the weather, walk north in time for the crops." Interspersed with these Dorothea Lange-esque scenes is the novel's fictive present: the courtship and marriage between Lila and a small-town Reverend named John Ames. "Interspersed" is not quite the right word: the novel's past and present are woven in such a way that one bleeds into the next, creating a dream-like duality to the prose, similar to the way in which friends reminiscing are as equally in the past as they are in their present. The sentence "Once, Lila asked the Reverend how to spell Doane," for instance, gently pries us from Lila's memories of cornfields and campfires and settles us back into the love story. Stylistically, it mirrors the shifting Lila feels within herself – part wild child, part woman – and whether, given her nature, she will ever be able to accept happiness. This fracturing of the self recalls the character of Sylvie in Housekeeping, a transient woman charged with two children after her sister commits suicide. Sylvie "seldom removed her coat," the narrator of Housekeeping, Ruth, says, "and every story she told had to do with a train or bus station." Sylvie is one of contemporary literature's most fascinating creations, but Housekeeping was from Ruth's point of view. Though Lila is written in the third person, it is Lila's worldview and Lila's gaze. How wonderful to delve even deeper this time into the matter of restless women. Robinson's latest is psychological realism at its best: a journey into an unusual person's mind.
By the time Lila meets the Reverend, she has endured the Depression, Doll's death, and a terrible stint in a St. Louis whorehouse. Despite her lack of a traditional education, Lila is an introspective, philosophical woman, her interior life more real than whatever tangible reality surrounds her. Skittish and distrustful, she settles in a shack just outside of Gilead, Iowa, washing her clothes in the river and catching fish for food. Lila is, among other things, a love story, but what distinguishes it is that a woman is the stranger who has come to town. She is the one who might at any moment pack up and leave, the mysterious one with the checkered past. She describes herself as a "likeness of woman, with hands but no face at all, since she never let herself see it." One day she steps inside a church to avoid the rain and when she sees the Reverend it is, for lack of a better description, love at first sight for them both. He is much older than Lila, as gentle as you'd expect a reverend to be, a "beautiful old man" saddened by the death of his first wife and baby in childbirth so many years before. Were it not for Gilead, he might seem a little saintly. Indeed, with so much badness in Lila's past – and the hint of so many bad men – the Reverend can seem too good at times. That said, this is Lila's show. The old man may be just that to her: Beautiful.
Unsurprisingly, after Lila meets the Reverend she becomes consumed with the problem of existence. How to make sense of all the hardship she endured? Of not knowing what sorrow happened in that mess of a house to make Doll steal her away; of not knowing what badness she might have inherited and what she might pass down through her genes. Faced with the Reverend's religiosity, she struggles with how to think about a person like Doll – or Doane and the other drifters: "all those people out there walking the roads all those years, hardly a one of them remembering the Sabbath." In one of the novel's most sensual scenes, the Reverend finally baptizes her. Days later she is in the river, trying to wash it off: "If Doll was going to be lost forever, Lila wanted to be right there with her, holding to the skirt of her dress."
Instead, she and the Reverend get married and have a child. The novel ends with the birth, and a kind of quiet washes over Lila and her troubled mind. Despite this, one morning she tells her husband, "I can't love you as much as I love you. I can't feel as happy as I am." The universe has given her stillness, a husband, a child, and a home, and yet "when you're scalded, touch hurts, it makes no difference if it's kindly meant." Like Ruth of Housekeeping, the Reverend lives with the sad fact that Lila might leave him. And so he lets her wander; he tells her it's okay if one day she has to go. It's a predicament best explained in a line from Housekeeping: "It seemed … that if she could remain transient here, she would not have to leave." Even the townspeople of Gilead give Lila a wide berth. They leave her "to her smiling quiet, since it always upset her to feel that more was wanted of her."
By the end of Lila, the problem of existence remains large (as it should). There is no reconciliation of Lila's past and present; there are no easy answers for her, not even those the Bible and her kind Reverend offer. But there is comfort. And stillness. In Lila, Robinson has made a profound statement about the safety, and therefore absolute necessity, of love. And yet, it being Iowa, there is always the possibility of a storm on the horizon, of things "caught up in the wind as if they were escaping at last, at last, from having to be whatever they were."
Marjorie Celona is the author of the novel Y.