In Defense of Robinson’s Home

Posted on | June 16, 2009 | 4 Comments

Rusty Reno has done the unthinkable: he’s called Marilynne Robinson’s Home a disappointment. Few recent novels have found such universal acclaim, especially among youngish theologians and pomo fiends, who adore anything that spills from Robinson’s pen. I’m one of them, so I should know.

In his First Things piece, Reno artfully summarizes the shared narrative of Home and Robinson’s preceding companion novel, Gilead, set in mid-century, small-town Iowa. Strangely enough, although Reno confesses his disappointment in Home at the start, he spends a large portion of his piece drawing out the fascinating Jacob and Esau theme that Robinson weaves throughout her latest novel (which he says is Robinson “at her best”). The novel observes the prodigal Jack Boughton’s relationship with both his father, the Presbyterian pastor, Robert Boughton, and his namesake, the Congregational minister, John Ames (this relationship is more central in the preceding Gilead). Growing up as the son of a devout pastor, Jack lived under the shadowy expectations of grace, but never felt at rest. Although he bore the demeanor of a minister, often being mistaken for one, Jack was always wandering away, figuratively and literally. While details are never brought into sharp relief, the reader gradually finds out Jack had a shady past — wandering alone without a home, thieving in his indolence, abandoning his own lover and child (whom his father and sister cared for in his absence). Jack’s ministerial father has trouble understanding, let alone accepting, the reasons for his son’s rebellion.

For these pseudo-biblical theads, Reno expresses admiration for the novel. It’s not until the end of his review that Reno finally explains why, in the end, he dislikes Home. Put simply, he contends that the dialogue and narration are “stilted and formulaic.” He provides no examples. In fact, the only part of the novel with which he explicitly takes issue is a brief passage in which Jack and the Rev. Boughton have an argument about the civil rights march in Selma. The elder Boughton, law-abiding Presbyterian that he is, wishes that the protesters would find a way to express themselves without disturbing the social order. He tells Jack, “The apostle Paul says we should do everything ‘decently and in order.’ You can’t have people running aruond the streets like that.” Jack objects with barely contained emotion that children are getting beaten with firehoses. Law and order be damned, he implies; there’s something more important going on. As Reno mentions, the reader knows that Jack feels doubly strong about this confrontation because he has fathered a child with a black woman whom “the law” will not let him marry. He sees his son represented in the beaten children in Selma. In the confrontation between Jack and his father over the civil rights march, the reader can see in microcosm the fundamental source of contention between the two. Robert Boughton, for all his piety and Presbyterian trust in God’s arrangement of life, does not understand how grace and forgiveness assault the natural order of things. To forgive is to admit that something is wrong with the world. And throughout Home, Boughton struggles with that admission. He is simply unwilling to confront the fact that Jack has fallen and needs his father to recognize that fact before he can move on. In this, Boughton’s Calvinism is both the problem and the (neglected) answer. Over and over again, the novel observes how the elder Boughton wants to believe that everything is all right, that Jack’s return home will be permanent and may even blot out the very memory of his past wrongdoings. Nothing needs confronting. No disruption of the order of things is desired. For Rev. Boughton, Jack must be Jacob, the thief of blessing whom he loves. There is no need to forgive Jacob; he’s the chosen one who doesn’t need to wander into exile in Edom. God wouldn’t do things any differently.

Inexplicably, and in spite of all this, Reno asserts that Home’s narrative is “largely inert, the characters are one-dimensional, and the dialogue… mechanical.” I have the sense from his review that Reno somehow couldn’t get past his dislike of the racial themes which Robinson employs at several key points. Interestingly, Reno professes a love for Gilead, which dealt with many of the same themes of race and reconciliation. (Perhaps those were easier to overlook because they were set in John Brown’s Kansas, whereas the cultural events in Home are more contemporary, and painful, memories for us.) For Robinson, the rift between father and son, and black and white, are not as disconnected, or “irrevelant,” as Reno suggests. Both require a radical re-valuation. Both are aspects of the natural order which, in good Barthian fashion, must be re-invented in Christ. And I think Robinson quietly suggests that the Calvinism of John Ames is able to come to terms with this, while the Calvinism of Boughton only hardens his heart against his son. Ames sees in Jack not an inexplicable prodigal, but a God-like son who is never too far removed to be called home. The elder Boughton fails to rejoice in the caprice of grace, which resides even in a faithless, role-shifting thief like his son, Jack.

So perhaps in the end, Jack himself is an agent of grace, disrupting the quiet life of Gilead, Iowa. To some he brings reconciliation and rest; to others, distrust and regret. Those who embrace him are the true Jacobs; those who turn him away are placed in an exile of their own choice. That’s the hard truth of violent grace, Robinson seems to suggest. And like a good Calvinist, she willing to let providence have the last word on all that.

Comments

4 Responses to “In Defense of Robinson’s Home”

  1. Nathan P. Origer
    June 16th, 2009 @ 9:47 am

    Davey, talk about impeccable timing. I just finally cracked open Home last week, and finished it last night. I haven’t moseyed on over to read Reno’s piece yet, but I’m flabbergasted. Your disquisition here is spot-on, and I truly believe that Jack Boughton is one of the best characters developed in fiction in the last century, if not the best. I certainly can’t comprehend how anyone would suggest that Jack is a one-dimensional character. I feel the same way about Glory, and even in the Rev. Boughton’s seeming one-dimensionality (if one should be even that charitable to Reno’s reading of the work!), the struggles one sees, I think, evince a greater depth of character than Robinson’s words may ostensibly suggest.

  2. Davey Henreckson
    June 16th, 2009 @ 9:53 am

    I agree about Jack. He’s a fascinating paradox in Gilead, but his character becomes twice as developed, imho, when standing in contrast/relief to his father in Home.

    And, for the record, while I think Gilead may be the slightly better novel, Home was more personally affecting. But maybe that’s just me.

  3. Defending Home « Nathancontramundi
    June 16th, 2009 @ 9:59 am

    [...] against Rusty Reno’s inconceivably off-base attack, at First Things (Are we surprised?) here, at [...]

  4. Brad E.
    June 16th, 2009 @ 3:06 pm

    Nothing to add except amen and amen. Even for all the acclaim afforded Robinson and her work, I still think she and they are somehow under-appreciated. We continue to live in the presence of greatness, and are only the more blessed by it. So thanks for the defense!

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Theopolitical is the weblog of Davey Henreckson, a graduate student in theology at the University of Notre Dame. Topics of conversation are political and historical theology, with semi-frequent forays into literature, economics, localism, and the divine American sport -- baseball.

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