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Marilynne Robinson's new novel, Home, is two fairly distinct works of fiction. It is a companion volume to her previous novel, Gilead, one that deepens that volume's meditation on fathers and sons. Or, read on its own, Home is a subtle look at what makes home home, the place where, as Robert Frost wrote, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. I think it is a richer work, if you've read Gilead, but I'd like to deal with the two faces of Robinson's novel separately.

First, if you have not read Gilead: Home retells the story of the prodigal son. Jack Boughton, son of a Presbyterian minister, returns after 20 years to the small town of Gilead, Iowa. His father, Robert, is overjoyed at his return, though Jack is a problem child. The family's black sheep, Jack has been, to put it biblically, a thoughtless, drunken fornicator - though in Robinson's hands, he is also literate, thoughtful and not as brutal as his sins suggest. After siring a child with a young girl, he fled Gilead, abandoning his daughter, and stayed incommunicado for 20 years.

• Home, by Marilynne Robinson, HarperCollins, 325 pages, $29.95

Why should the father cherish the return of such a son? While Home doesn't directly answer that question, it goes at it obliquely, guilefully. The father, Robert Boughton, is ill. He spends much of his time in his room. When he appears, it is to listen to his children speak or play piano, to reassure his son that he is loved, or to meet with his friend John Ames (the narrator of Gilead). He is a principled - though not perfect - old man who has spent his life trying to do right by the world. His feelings for his son are a mixture of affection and guilt. We learn as much, if not more, about Jack, and reasons to welcome his return, from the novel's other major character, his sister Glory.

Though the men are the ostensible centres of this work, the work's emotional centre is Glory Boughton. She has returned to Gilead after a failed, somewhat humiliating romance, and she believes herself to be something of a failure, too: a woman without the talent of her siblings, forced to return home after an unsuccessful foray in the world. Home, the Boughton farm, is not as fraught for her as it is for Jack. It isn't the scene of her worst humiliations, so it carries pleasant memories of her mother and father, her siblings and her childhood as the youngest of eight children. This is crucial, because Glory is the one who cooks, cleans, worries about her brother, cherishes the intimacy they had as children, a time when she looked up to her older brothers with something like awe. It is through Glory that Robinson's meditation on home is most acutely realized, a psychologically poignant detail, since Glory, as the youngest child, is the one most in need of home.

“ Marilynne Robinson is one of the most thoughtful of U.S. writers”

And what is home? Robinson can no more directly answer that than she could "what is love?" or "what is desire?" The Boughton home is made up of the smell of food, the having of company, affection, the attention of one's parents, fear, misunderstanding, the particular way the eight children played together, church, the Bible, hymns, the sound of a piano, the land itself and the town of Gilead.

All of these things, plus thoughts about them, memories of them, are what make up home, and they are the things Jack Boughton has voluntarily surrendered. More, they cannot hold him. Though he returns home, he eventually leaves it again. The prodigal son, in Robinson's telling, is forever strange, a perpetual stranger. And the "why" of that strangeness is what defines Jack: He is a man who wishes to believe in something, anything, who would like to reassure his father that he has found faith, but who cannot lie. He can't offer his father false comfort and so, for him the abyss follows, it preys on him, even when he is in his parents' house. Though the prodigal's return is cause for celebration, home is what drove him from home in the first place. Where can he find comfort?

This novel, Home, considered without its companion, Gilead, is thoughtful, deliberately paced, well written and complex. It's not a book that can be rightly judged too quickly. In the matter of moral goodness, for instance, all is not necessarily what is seems. Jack has virtues that are as striking as his failings and, in one matter at least, his attitude to race, he is a truer Presbyterian than his father, the minister.

And to be honest, Home has its longueurs. Jack is not as vivid a character as one might expect. His politeness and distance, which are insisted upon as a way to show his un-homeness, make him repetitive and a little dull. The time spent in the middle of the novel outlining Glory's relationship to Jack is also at times a little dull, time spent watching a very crack shot lining up her target.

Home considered along with its companion is, as I suggested, a different matter. First, it becomes part of a two-volume examination of fathers and sons. Gilead, which dealt with the Boughtons' neighbour, Rev. Ames, was something of a meditation on filial responsibility and on paternal duty. Home can be considered as an intriguing extension of that meditation.

Also, Jack Boughton was dramatically introduced in Gilead. That novel's narrator, Rev. Ames himself, profoundly disliked Jack, for complex and understandable reasons. Ames's dislike colours our view of Jack but adds to what fascinates about him. The energy of Ames's dislike, the undertone of sexual jealousy, carries over from Gilead to Home, if one has read Gilead first. Home's publisher suggests that the books complement each other, though, like neighbours, they stand apart. Fair enough, but I would suggest reading Gilead first. Ames is a good companion, a likeable and trustworthy narrator, and he introduces Jack Boughton in the best way possible: with suspicion. And that wariness helps one through Home's tedious stretches.

In either case, Marilynne Robinson is one of the most thoughtful of U.S. writers. Her work is morally complex and subtle and, if that's not enough, she is at times an extraordinary stylist: words pitched precisely to effect. Though Home is slower than Gilead and not all of its characterizations worked for me, it is still a terrific novel.

André Alexis is, most recently, author of the novel Asylum.