Wanted: More Balm in Gilead

摘要

Samuel beckett couldn't have made it much sparer: three characters (father, son and daughter) who talk, talk, talk for more than 300 pages and say pretty much the same things over and over. Almost all the action is contained in the kitchen, the garden and the barn of an old house in the little fictional town of Gilead, Iowa, in the mid-'50s. Actually, "action" may be too strong a word, since the changes and plot twists that do occur are almost all confined to mental landscapes. The miracle-not such a strange word here, given this novel's consuming interest in things spiritual-is that not only do we keep reading Marilynne Robinson's "Home," but that we do so compulsively, as avidly as we might read a detective thriller. This is Robinson's second trip to Gilead, the location of the novel for which she won a Pulitzer Prize in 2005. But this time the point of view has shifted down the road. The earlier story was told by the Rev. John Ames, an elderly minister, in the form of a letter to his 7-year-old son. "Home," slightly more omniscient, is told from the point of view of Glory Boughton, the 38-year-old daughter of the Rev.