Hmm. Hmm hmm hmm. This was an unusual book, and no mistake.
The whole thing is a letter from an aging pastor with a deadly heart problem -- he's writing to his young son because he knows his son will have to grow up without getting to know him, and he wants to leave him with some understanding of who his father was. So, there are no chapter breaks, just places where he stops writing for a while and then comes back.
It's a series of musings about this man's life, his views on the world, his family history, and his thoughts on religion. There's also a lot about how he met his much-younger wife, the joy she and their son have brought to his waning years, and what it's like to be the pastor of a very small congregation in rural Iowa in the first half of the twentieth century.
Me, I was born in rural Iowa when my father was the pastor of a very small congregation. So I probably related to that aspect more than some readers would. We moved away when I was three, but my family's roots are all in rural Iowa, and my parents have retired there. It's a good, rich place to live, with its own quiet beauty and strength. Some of that shone through in this book, and I was glad of that.
Yeah, anyway, about the book. It rambles, it circles back to things discussed earlier, it goes off on tangents -- I eventually just had to sternly tell myself that I would finish this book before I could start reading anything else. As it is, it took me five months to finish it.
Now, it wasn't boring. It was really quite fascinating. Except that, I somehow never remembered how interesting it was when I wasn't actively reading it. I would set it down and just go my merry way, and only physically seeing it would remind me to read it. That's very weird for me, as usually I think about the things I'm reading while I'm not actually reading them. I can only remember one other instance when I was this disconnected from a book I was enjoying, and that was Papillon by Henri Charriere. Same thing there when I read that one ten or twelve years ago -- I'd be engrossed while reading, then totally detach as soon as I put it down. So weird.
The most interesting part was when the narrator was talking about the Spanish Influenza during World War One. He says, "People came to church wearing masks, if they came at all. They'd sit as far from each other as they could" (p. 47). Boy, does that sound familiar! And, lest you think Robinson wrote that with Covid-19 in mind, this book was published in 2004, when it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Anyway, I disagreed with a lot of the main character's theology, and I was really sad that he never leaned on God for comfort or help. There's a middle-aged man whose story weaves in and out of this one who desperately needed to know that God loves and forgives him, but the pastor never shared that with this other man at all, and toward the end, that made me pretty disgusted. It IS a pretty clear picture of what happens when you remove Christ from Christianity, I'll give it that.
The title interests me greatly because, these days, the Bible reference to Gilead that springs to mind most often is from Jeremiah 8, when he laments, "Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?" (Jer. 8: 22 KJV) I can see how that relates to the book, because both the pastor narrator and the middle-aged man he keeps trying to help both are searching for the balm of God's love and forgiveness and utterly missing out on it.
Still, it was a beautifully written, contemplative book, as you'll see in the parts I quote below. But I left it feeling like it could have been so much more. The narrator clings to the forms and idea of faith, but not to the Savior we place our faith in. In the end, it felt empty of hope and joy, and that was disappointing.
Particularly Good Bits:
It seems to me some people just go around looking to get their faith unsettled. That has been the fashion for the last hundred years or so (p. 27).
I am also inclined to overuse the word 'old,' which actually has less to do with age, as it seems to me, than it does with familiarity. it sets a thing apart as something regarded with a modest, habitual affection. Sometimes it suggests a haplessness or vulnerability. I say 'old Boughton,' I say 'this shabby old town,' and I mean that they are very near my heart (p. 32-33) (My Iowa-born pastor father uses 'old' the exact same way.)
To be useful was the best thing the old men ever hoped for themselves, and to be aimless was their worst fear (p. 56).
It is a good thing to know what it is to be poor, and a better thing if you can do it in company (p. 227).
If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-13 for discussions of violence and bloodshed during the Civil War, racism, miscegenation laws, and some non-smutty discussions of unwed motherhood. No bad language or racy scenes.
This has been my 54th book read off my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfProject2022.
