'Home': Can a parent's love provide redemption?

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (MCT) - "Home: A Novel" by Marilynne Robinson; Farrar, Straus and Giroux ($25)

Her canvas remains the same as her last novel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Gilead." It is still 1956 in the town of Gilead in Iowa, still the same events, the same two pastors and their families, the same meditation on religious impetus and human emotions. But Marilynne Robinson brings a sparkling freshness to this old fictional world by shifting perspectives in her tender and equally masterful new novel, "Home."

In the 2004 "Gilead," aging Congregationalist preacher John Ames reflects on spirituality and humanity in letters to be given to his 6-year-old son when he is grown, after his father's death. "Home" shifts to the home of Ames' best friend, dying Presbyterian minister Robert Boughton, and the heartbreaking attempts at a spiritual connection between him and his deeply loved but disappointing son, Jack.

The third-person narrative unfolds through the eyes of Glory Boughton, who at 38 has returned home after a soured romance to nurse her weakened father.

A letter arrives one day. The reverend is elated. It's from Jack. He is coming home _ after an absence of 20 years, during which time he neither called nor wrote nor came home for his mother's funeral. When Jack arrives, he respectfully attends to the old man, but reveals little of his life.

The superbly portrayed interaction among the three Boughtons forms the novel's heart, with the action taking place mainly in their vine-covered home, its porch, their garden and the barn.

Each of the three characters is deeply imagined. Gentle Glory gains an innate understanding of her 43-year-old brother; their wit knits them together. She accepts his rejection of the family's churchgoing life. She makes no judgment of his jail time, his drunken ways or the crowning sin that so wounded their father and prompted Jack to leave home. In fact, Glory sees the small actions that indicate the goodness in Jack.

"There is a saying that to understand is to forgive, but that is an error," she remembers, "so Papa used to say you must forgive in order to understand."

The reverend struggles between understanding and forgiving, loving and rejecting, excusing and censoring. He worries for the soul of his best-loved prodigal son. He tells Jack of his deep love, yet, declining in health, he rails at the son in disappointment, at the wasted life.

"So many times, over the years, I've tried not to love you so much. I never got anywhere with it, but I tried," he tells Jack. And later he says of Jack: "I thanked God for him every day of his life, no matter how much grief, how much sorrow_and at the end of it all there is only more grief, more sorrow, and his life will go on that way, no help for it now. You see something beautiful in a child, and you almost live for it, you feel as though you would die for it, but it isn't yours to keep or to protect."

In Jack, Robinson has created one of literature's more enduring and tragic characters. Jack touches your soul. His sorrow is as palpable as his longing for doing right. He wants to be forgiven, yet be loved for who he is_his differences from the rest of the clan. He recognizes happiness is not for him. He looks for grace.

"Home" is a quietly brilliant picture of small-town Protestant America of the 1950s, a quiet exploration of the contradictions in religion and societal or human nature.

When does forgiveness end and understanding evaporate, the novel asks. And is a parent's unending love enough for a son's redemption?

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© 2008, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.