home

For anyone who enjoyed Gilead, Marilynne Robinson‘s second novel, which won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, you will love her new novel, Home.  For she has just crossed town, so to speak, and turned around to tell us the story from a different porch. 

On page 29 of Gilead, narrated by John Ames, he tells us, “I walked over to Boughton’s to see what he was up to…Glory is there doing everything she can think of to make him comfortable…”  It is here at Boughton’s that most of Home takes place. 

Again in Gilead, on page 86, “Glory has come to tell me Jack Boughton is home.” 

Home is written in the third person from Glory’s point of view.  Although each of these novels is complete in and of itself, together they become two halves of a greater world.

Some of my favorite lines in Home:

“Such times you had!” her father said, as if the present slight desolation were confetti and candy wrappers left after the passing of some glorious parade.”

“The joke seemed to be that once they were very young and now they were very old, and that they had been the same day after day and were somehow at the end of it all so utterly changed.”

“There is so much to be grateful for, words are poor things…”

“How to announce the return of comfort and well-being except by cooking something fragrant.  That is what her mother always did.  After every calamity of any significance she would fill the atmosphere of the house with the smell of cinnamon rolls or brownies, or with chicken and dumplings, and it would mean, This house has a soul that loves us all, no matter what.”

“And here is the world, she thought, just as we left it.”