In her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “Gilead” (2004), Marilynne Robinson introduced readers to the Rev. John Ames, an elderly Congregationalist preacher in a small town in Iowa in the 1950s. Written as a letter to his young son, “Gilead” is the story of Ames’ passionate love affair with his much younger wife, Lila, whose lower-class background, minimal education and flawed English make her an unlikely match for the learned, relatively well-off Reverend.
But who is Lila, really? What is it that has left her so sad and often angry? And why is she so feral, so resentful of help, and so sensitive to the opinions of the people of Gilead?
These and other questions are answered in “Lila,” the third book in what has developed into a “Gilead” series (which also includes 2008’s “Home,” in which Robinson explored the family life of John Ames’ friend and neighbor, the Rev. Robert Boughton). Lila, it turns out, spent much of her childhood during the Great Depression as a homeless orphan, barely surviving in the company of a woman named Doll and a band of drifters who scrounged a meager living from itinerant farm work. Shifting back and forth from that backstory and the present in Gilead, Robinson fills in the gaps of Lila’s life as she struggles to adapt to her new role as Mrs. Ames.
Printers Row Journal caught up with Robinson, 70, for a phone interview from her home in Iowa City, where she teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Here’s an edited transcript of our chat.
Q: When you wrote “Gilead,” did you envision a series?
A: I really didn’t. I always thought that sequels, or writing anything that looked like a sequel, was not anything I was interested in doing. But then these characters stayed so much on my mind. I don’t think of it formally as a trilogy. I just think of it as an unfolding, as one big book rather than three books.
Q: What was your thought process, then, in returning to Lila? I’m guessing you wanted to go back to discover her past.
A: I have a very strong sense of characters. People ask me how I create characters, and I think I simply recognize that there is a character in my imagination. It doesn’t sound like anything very useful to say, but having the sense of Lila that I had, I knew there must be certain things that had to be true of her — that she was an orphan, for example.
Q: We know from “Gilead” that Lila is a grave and somewhat sad person. We didn’t know exactly what it is that made her that way. But now we do. She had an impoverished early life, and there’s a shame in her — a shame in being poor, and an embarrassment that people know she’s poor.
A: There’s a kind of shyness, too — the fact that being as poor as she is, she’s so vulnerable to other people’s attention.
Q: She talks about not wanting to be “beholden” to people, which seems central to her makeup. My father was born during the Depression, and I think people of his generation were very much like that.
A: Particularly at that time in our country, a lot of very proud people were put in the position of being more dependent on others than they felt they ought to. There was nothing anybody could do; the generous people could only be generous, and the proud people could only do as well as they could with being put in the position of being the objects of charity. It was a very painful experience and, socially speaking, it wasn’t a very healthy situation.
Q: There’s a historical context we should probably mention here. Nowadays, if you are homeless, there are social services that you might be eligible for. But in Lila’s time and place, there was nothing like that. She was on her own, pretty much.
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A: That’s very true. In big cities there might have been soup kitchens, but that would have magnified her sense of being the recipient of charity.
Q: Lila also probably has what we would diagnose today as depression. There’s a comment she makes early on to the Reverend, which is “I been wondering why I even bother.” She doesn’t quite finish the sentence, but really she means, “I don’t know why I bother to keep on living.”
A: Well, you know, she has a great deal to be depressed about. I kind of believe in the legitimacy of the emotions, even the rather extreme ones. She’s had very little in her life, and lost even that. It would be inhuman of her not to feel deeply sad.
Q: And yet the book is also a romance. She finds this connection with the Reverend.
A: Yes.
Q: And it seems to me that the thing he responds to in her is that, even though she is, as she puts it, “an ignorant woman,” she’s still very bright and has a spiritual curiosity. She has some of the same questions about the meaning of life that he has.
A: That’s right. I think they also have a similar kind of loneliness; it’s like a space they share between them. He spends a lot of time with people having difficulties in their lives, and he sees her as a pure figure of the difficulty of life.
Q: It’s often said about your “Gilead” novels that you have a rare interest — rare in the context of contemporary American literature — in religion as a real phenomenon in people’s lives. To the extent that religion is there at all in most novels, it’s usually the subject of satire or the object of condemnation. You have a different perspective on this, in that you’re a scholar of religion, and Christianity in particular. How has that perspective informed your novels?
A: I’ve always found religion and religious thought to be very beautiful and very interesting. It’s what I study and it’s always there in my fictional imagination. It’s as if religion, and Christianity in particular, is the prior state of my thinking before I turned toward scholarship or toward writing fiction. I don’t decide to write about religion. I’m simply preoccupied by it, and therefore write about it.
Q: Do the “Gilead” novels express some of your own religious feeling?
A: Yes, that’s fair to say. The tradition of John Ames is mine; he’s a Congregationalist, and I am, too. I think it would not be so available to me to write about that tradition if it were not one I know deeply. In terms of how John looks at the world, it expresses my own feeling, my own habits of mind.
Q: Certainly he’s an extraordinary figure in contemporary fiction. I don’t want to call him a saint, but he’s a remarkably kind, generous, thoughtful and truly Christian man, and I can’t think of another person like him in recent fiction. If there’s a preacher in most novels, he’s a crook of some kind.
A: Right. And it’s so strange, because this is such a churchgoing country. There’s a church on every corner, you know? People often come up to me and say, “John is so like my father,” or “He’s just like my minister.” Sometimes three people will come up and they’re all ministers, from one family. These people are very important in people’s lives. It’s strange that you don’t often encounter them in fiction as normal, high-functioning human beings.
Q: To turn to the craft of these novels, there’s a particular approach you have to the matter of voice. When Lila speaks directly, her verbs aren’t quite right; she says “I seen it,” not “I saw it,” things like that. It must have been tricky to come up with just the right tone for the narrator’s voice in a way that conveys her thinking, but not in the language she is capable of. So I guess you had to find this narrator’s voice, which is a bit different from the narrator’s voice in the other two books.
A: Yes, I had to create a certain kind of mind, a character who had a very narrow frame of reference, a limited vocabulary and so on. I knew the novel couldn’t be in first person, and it couldn’t be close third person, really. She’s a very stoical character, and there are a lot of things she just wouldn’t talk about, even to herself.
Q: It’s also, faintly I think, a Biblical voice. There’s a plainspoken poetry in that voice, that maybe has a kinship with the work of Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy and other writers who seem to have been influenced by the tempos and rhythms of the Bible, which of course Lila is always copying out passages from.
A: I think that must be true, because people tell me there are Biblical sounds in my prose. But, you know, I’ve read the Bible a great deal, and if something really influences you, you’re not really aware of it. Of course, the great model of simple, direct language is the Bible; that’s what the early translators were trying to capture. So I think there are ways in which the Bible is enormously useful, from the point of view of creating a very rich and compressed but nevertheless basically simple world — a simple language that’s capable of holding great complexity of thought.
Q: There’s a Biblical cadence in the book, too. I’m thinking of your narrator’s descriptions of nature, for example — the light at a particular time of day, the trees, the sky. There’s a wonder in it, a sense of, as the Reverend might put it, the grace of God.
A: Well, yes. Yes. I suppose the language is the language of the Psalms.
Q: On the other hand, a lot of the book deals with the issue of class. It’s not just a matter of Lila being paranoid about what people think of her. It’s not just in her head; she’s not entirely imagining this condescension that’s coming at her from the townspeople and even from the Reverend, at times, although in an unintended way.
A: I suppose I’m a realist in this sense. It’s not the simplest thing in the world for people to talk across, for example, dialect differences, you know? John has the utmost respect for Lila; he can see that she’s a brilliant woman, in her way. But it’s very difficult for him to speak to her in ways that don’t raise issues in her mind about their differences of dialect, educational level, cultural experience.
Q: He treats her the way you might treat a skittish animal in your yard. You have to be very slow and gentle, lest that animal run off — and of course, Lila does run off, on more than one occasion in the book. There’s one passage where she leaves and then comes back, and he says, “If you ever change your mind, I want you to leave by daytime … even if that means seeing you to the train.” Which makes you admire him even more. He’s aware, certainly, of how fragile their relationship is, and how hard it is for her to fit into this new world as the wife of the town preacher.
A: That’s true. He’s very afraid of alienating her, of making her feel that he’s standing in judgment of her. He really loves her, but he’s very aware of the potential he has for doing her harm, for making her feel rejected.
Q: It’s also true that she tends to misunderstand certain things. Early on, when he stands up as she enters the room at the church, she thinks he’s upset that she’s there, that he wants her to leave. She doesn’t realize that a gentleman always stands up when a lady enters.
A: They don’t know how to read each other’s signs.
Q: Is this the end of the “Gilead” story?
A: I really can imagine doing another one, although that doesn’t mean that I will. There are still other characters in my mind that have not had their own moment yet. But you know, I never planned to write the second book, and I never planned to write the third one. And now I’m not planning to write a fourth one, but that doesn’t mean that I won’t.
Kevin Nance is a Chicago-based freelance writer and photographer. Twitter: @KevinNance1 More Top Picks Best Borescopes
“Lila”
By Marilynne Robinson, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 261 pages, $26