Gilead is a novel set in a small eponymous community in Iowa in the 1950s. It’s told as a series of journal entries written by an elderly Congregationalist minister, who is dying. You have perhaps concluded—not unreasonably—that it sounds boring. Somehow, it isn’t.
Marilynne Robinson, the author of Gilead, is extraordinarily talented. She writes so beautifully and deftly that she can make a sprinkler sound like a holy object, “you two are dancing around in your iridescent little downpour, whooping and stomping as sane people ought to do when they encounter a thing so miraculous as water.” Robinson published her first novel, Housekeeping, in 1980, to immense critical acclaim, and then went twenty-four years without publishing another work of fiction before releasing Gilead, in 2004. She says she only started working on Gilead a handful of years before its publication, but you can feel the enormous amount of thought and feeling—and sheer storytelling ability—that had been gathering for decades. At some moments, the language mounts and book almost feels luminous:
There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal. So how could it subordinate itself to cause or consequence?
Robinson has created something singular in the character of John Ames, our seventy-seven-year-old narrator. He is suffering from heart failure, and he writes for his seven-year-old son, the product of a late-in-life marriage with a woman decades younger than Ames.
I realize that this sounds daunting: not only are we stuck in the mind of a minister, but one putting his best foot forward for posterity. Admittedly, Ames can be prim. When he’s prescribed brandy for his heart, he drinks it in the pantry with the curtain drawn, so that his son doesn't witness it. But he also has a wry sense of humor (at one point musing over which book he should keep near him, so that if he has a heart attack, it might gain some posthumous significance) and a surprising edge (“I don’t know how one boy could have caused so much disappointment without ever giving anyone grounds for hope,” he says, of one character).
That second quote is in reference to a younger man named Jack Boughton. The rift between Jack and Ames drives a great deal of the narrative (more on that later). Jack, a man whose life is so troubled that Ames’ circumspection stops him from telling us about it at first, initially strikes us as a more interesting protagonist than Ames, as does Ames’ young wife, who came to Gilead as a drifter, with no family and no education. But I think the reason that Robinson is so interested in Ames as a character—and the thing that makes it so fascinating to be inside his mind—is his goodness. He is what gives Gilead its soul. It’s an old observation that literature has a much greater interest in villains, and if not villains per se, than in villainous, selfish corners of a character’s heart. There’s much greater appetite for stories of infidelity than there is for stories of a happy marriage. Characters like Raskolnikov and Ahab and Macbeth and Iago, who are privy to paranoia and pride and obsession and resentment and self-destruction, have captured a vast share of the world’s imagination. Good characters exist mainly as foils for the fun, tortured monsters whom we’d much rather read about. Yet, with Ames, Robinson has successfully created the most interesting good character in contemporary literature. He’s not flawless—as will be discussed below—but he always aspires to the good. And through Ames’s goodness, Robinson is able to explore, with great intellectual depth and rigor, the nature of human virtue in the Christian tradition.
I was not raised religious. If anything, I was raised with a vague contempt for religion. The notion of an intellectual Christianity would have sounded to me like an oxymoron. I had read portions of the Bible in school but found it stilted—too many “begats.” Reading Gilead for the first time served as a bridge to the Biblical tradition, for me—a translator for a language I had always heard but never really understood. The town of Gilead is a place that almost exists outside of time, and the novel reaches toward themes that are genuinely timeless: morality, the relationships between fathers and sons, the question of what we leave behind and whether any of it matters.
Robinson is a devout Christian—she has served as a deacon to her congregation—and her faith is not incidental to the book; it is obviously the main character’s vocation. For Ames, theology isn’t simply an intellectual exercise but the very medium of his inner life, infusing everything he does and says and thinks. Robinson has written a novel in which a deep body of Christian thought suffuses every page, shining up through the 1950s Iowa surface. It’s the water the characters swim in, and so the reader swims in it, too.
This allowed me, a lay reader, to engage seriously with Christian thought that I might otherwise have dismissed as irrelevant. One might look at the Christian tradition and see it as an enormous misdirection of human genius—that generations of great minds in the West devoted themselves, century after century, to a project that now feels like a dead end. And yet the sheer weight of that accumulated thought—the intellectual and spiritual tradition that runs from Augustine to Calvin through the Puritans and their influence on the American founding—nonetheless represents something formidable, nevermind one’s views about its premises. Robinson didn’t convert me, but she made me feel that weight. Members of Ames’ family have become atheists and he warns his son that all the lessons he’s been taught lose nearly all of their meaning without faith. I disagree. The tradition, true or not, sparked new ideas and crystallized thoughts I had been carrying around half-formed for years.[1] There are things to be gained from the ideas in this book because they are thoughtful and beautiful. That holds even if the ideas aren’t literally true.
Gilead is also the only book I’ve read that has had an impact on my daily behavior. Spending time in Ames’ mind leaves me more generous, less prone to impatience and anger, and at greater peace. Coming from a secular background, I always understood the social utility of churches—as symbols of a local dignitary’s power, as monuments to the reach of organized religion, and even as a kind of jobs program. But what I hadn’t yet grasped was their deeper purpose: to function as works of art that bring a participant into close contact with notions of the eternal and the divine. This is something that Robinson has created in this book, a literary cathedral.
John Ames comes from a long line of ministers. “My mother’s father was a preacher, and my father’s father was, too, and his father before him, and before that, nobody knows, but I wouldn't hesitate to guess,” he writes, early on. This lays the groundwork for the rest of the book, which is an exploration of father-son relationships. (In some ways, this makes Gilead a kind of spiritual sequel to Housekeeping, which is all about mother-daughter relationships, and the unconventional forms they can take.)
Ames’ grandfather received a divine vision when he was fifteen that shaped the rest of his life. His cause was righteous—he traveled from New England to the Midwest to participate in the fight against slavery—but all-consuming. He is “a man everlastingly struck by lightning,” as Ames puts it. He is an Old Testament figure who fought alongside John Brown in Kansas and delivered his sermons in a bloodied shirt, with a gun on his side, thundering on about judgment and grace. By the time Ames is a boy, his grandfather has been left behind by a country that has accepted the hypocrisies of Reconstruction, and has become something of an eccentric. He embraces what Ames describes as “a kind of holy poverty,” never keeping, or allowing his family to keep, anything worth giving away. (Ames’ mother remarks that “she could probably go to any town in the Middle West and see some pair of pants she’d patched walking by in the street.”) Ames notes that these eccentricities were best understood as a “thwarted passion, that he was full of anger, at us not least, and that the tremors of his old age were in some part the tremors of pent grief.” This anger, as we discover, was largely driven by the breach between Ames’ grandfather and father.
Ames’ father grows to fiercely oppose Ames’ grandfather’s convictions. Ames relates his father’s boyhood memories of encountering a soldier that Ames’ grandfather later murders in order to cover John Brown’s escape. Ames’ grandfather, father, and much of the congregation flocked to the Union cause. The Civil War killed many congregants, though, and drove Ames’ father into a fierce pacifism. He reminds the old man of his preaching in a bloodied shirt and insists that it was narcissism, not revelation, that led to his crusade.
These characters are so fully realized that it’s hard to say that Robinson picks a side between the Christian duty to right injustice and the Christian duty to peace. The grandfather’s theological justifications for war can’t help but light a fire in the reader but are chilling in their implications. Ames’ grandfather had preached that “while there was slavery there was no peace, but only a war of the armed and powerful against the captive and defenseless.” This is righteous, but could apply to someone arguing that health care executives are engaging in social murder, and that the righteous have a duty to act—a short journey to anarchy.
The competing convictions between the grandfather and father eventually drove the two men apart, leading to the grandfather abandoning his family and returning to Kansas, the site of his great and terrible victories, to die. When Ames begins his journal for his son, one of the first stories he tells is of the journey that he and his father went on to find his grandfather’s grave in some forgotten corner of that state.
That said, the novel is still willing to enjoy Ames’ grandfather as a kook. One of the funniest passages of the book is when Ames describes coming home from school, and finding his mother on the porch. “The Lord is in the parlor,” she informs him, quietly. Ames peers in and sees his grandfather sitting on the side of a couch, looking “attentive and sociable and gravely pleased,” as he converses with his visitor. Ames overhears his grandfather tell God, “I have often felt that way myself.” A nice tip of the hat to the creator of the universe.
It isn’t a surprise that Ames spends a great deal of time talking to his son about his father and grandfather. Ames has led a far quieter life than either of them. He fought in no wars; he has barely left Gilead. And while Ames has loyalty to his father’s pacifist convictions, an outsider might say his zeal does not match that of his ancestors. He tells his son that one of the sermons he’s proudest of is one that he wrote condemning America’s entry into the First World War. In the sermon, he went so far as to celebrate the Spanish Flu epidemic, explaining that the deaths from the disease “were rescuing foolish young men from the consequences of their own ignorance and courage, that the Lord was gathering them in before they could go off and commit murder against their brothers.” Ames burned that sermon before delivering it. As he noted, the men and women who were left in his congregation were no more supportive of the war than he was, and he couldn’t bear adding to their sorrow. He would feel ridiculous thundering from the pulpit. We know this was a kindness, even if Ames is conflicted.
As the book goes on, the reader begins to suspect that Ames might have a greater holiness about him than his grandfather or father ever did, whether he knows it or not. He possesses a grandeur of faith that allows him to recognize the beauty of the world and the people around him, not just his own zeal and sense of mission. Ames expresses nothing but respect (and some fear) for his grandfather’s visions, but at one point he gives this admonishment:
I believe that the old man did indeed have far too narrow an idea of what a vision might be. He may, so to speak, have been too dazzled by the great light of his experience to realize that an impressive sun shines on us all.
I think this passage captures the great insight that Robinson gives us in Ames: that a proper faith isn’t blinding, but opens your eyes further. Gilead is a fading town. It was founded by abolitionists as a bulwark against the expanding slave power in the Midwest and has outlived its purpose. Young people move away and Ames expects his son will too, one day. He nevertheless has gladly lived his life there. Ames feels that mortal existence will continue to hold value in the eternity of the afterlife: “all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets.” When you read about his life, you can believe it too. His grace at his approaching death does not just flow from his abiding faith in heaven, but also from a sense of beauty that suffuses him, pouring forth from the world and visible all around him. This is where this book succeeds where other books about death (e.g., Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych) fall short, at least to me. The sublime is invoked in both, but I think Robinson uniquely captures it here. In the earliest pages of the book, Ames comments that he can’t even tell what’s beautiful anymore. It’s because beauty is flowing all around him and out of him.
Ames—which, is to say, Robinson—is a marvelous writer. The sole clunky sentence in the book heralds the arrival of an antagonist (or as close to an antagonist as Ames, a man with no true enemies, can get). It’s a testament to Robinson’s writing that, when the prose gets worse, we understand this to be a plot development, rather than a failure on her part.
The antagonist in question is Jack, or John Ames Boughton, a man who was named after our narrator, John Ames. Theirs is the other major father-son relationship that the book explores. Jack is the son of Ames’ best friend, Robert Boughton, a Presbyterian minister in Gilead. The elder Boughton and Ames had grown up together and married their respective childhood sweethearts. Ames’ first wife died giving birth to their first child; Ames was able to arrive in time to hold the infant before she died in his arms. Ames spends decades in loneliness, but his faith gives him peace: he looks forward to reuniting with his wife and daughter in heaven, and he sometimes thinks about his daughter watching over him as he preaches. There are very affecting descriptions of this period in Ames’ life when he would take walks at night in order to glance into the windows of families going about their lives, praying for them and imagining a “peace they didn’t expect and couldn’t account for descending on their illness or their quarreling or their dreams.” One feels that Ames had reached some form of contentment.
The great rift in this life comes when the elder Boughton seeks to ease Ames’ suffering and names a son after him. Something in Ames recoils at this. Here is a bitter side to Ames, which he can barely bear to face. Explaining his immediate antipathy to the gesture, he writes that as he held his namesake, he considered that “I don’t know exactly what covetise is, but in my experience it is not so much desiring someone else’s virtue or happiness as rejecting it, taking offense at the beauty of it.”
Jack grows up to be troubled. He engages in childhood pranks, but they go beyond normal mischief (Ames sees them as indicative of Jack’s inherent “meanness,” a phrase he uses multiple times in the book). For instance, Jack poured molasses on Ames’ stoop, but he also stole a photograph of Ames’ dead wife. Jack eventually escalates to petty crime, with only his family’s reputation keeping him out of jail. This culminates in a truly disturbing bout of cruelty in which Jack rejects a child of his own. Ames is extremely upset by this, for obvious reasons. But his general antipathy toward Jack—when he’s so easily able to love and forgive seemingly everyone else—is more of a mystery.
At one point, Ames rejects the notion that Christians worship sorrow. That might be doctrinally sound, but you wonder about him. He admits, for instance, that he found the scriptural admonishment to “Rejoice with those who rejoice” difficult—“I was much better at weeping with those who weep.” Whether Ames knew, during his time in the wilderness, that he was overly attached to his own grief, is an open question. Perhaps he didn’t yet understand the greatness of the simple beauty that had infused his life and his ministry, and felt like he had missed a great crusade—like his grandfather’s for abolition, or his father’s for peace—prompting him to adopt the suffering of loneliness as a crusade of his own. Perhaps a namesake was an unwelcome intrusion into this treasured grief.
By the time the narrative begins, Jack has left town and Ames has entered into a wonderful marriage. (“How soft her voice is. That there should be such a voice in the whole world, and that I should be the one to hear it, seemed to me then and seems to me now an unfathomable grace.”) Jack soon returns to town, and, to Ames’ great distaste, starts to insert himself in Ames’ life. He appears at Ames’ home to spend time with Ames’ son, who adores him, taking special delight in being called “little brother” by Jack and playing catch with him. Jack, who is now in his early forties, is also the same age as Ames’ wife, with whom he develops a cordial relationship. A pivotal scene comes in the latter half of the book, when Ames, whose health at this point has significantly deteriorated, has drifted off on his porch. He rouses to hear a conversation between Jack and his wife. He observes that Jack “sounded like someone speaking with a friend. And so did she.” Both Jack and Ames’ wife had had struggles in their lives, and Jack might well understand her better than Ames ever could. When Jack says goodbye to her, we learn her name, Lila, for the first time.
Here is a brilliant dynamic that Robinson has constructed. Ames as a quasi-father figure to Jack, Jack as a potential interloper into Ames’ family, once Ames has died. At one point Ames is delivering a sermon and sees that Jack is sitting with his family:
[A]s I stood there in the pulpit, looking down on the three of you, you looked to me like a handsome young family, and my evil old heart rose within me, the old covetise I have mentioned elsewhere came over me, and I felt the way I used to feel when the beauty of other lives was a misery and an offense to me. And I felt as if I were looking back from the grave
I won’t reveal how this resolves, what Jack is after, or if any resolution is even possible between these two men. But, later in the book, Ames is able to approach some form of peace, which results in this exquisite passage:
This morning a splendid dawn passed over our house on its way to Kansas. This morning Kansas rolled out of its sleep into a sunlight grandly announced, proclaimed throughout heaven—one more of the very finite number of days that the old prairie has been called Kansas, or Iowa. But it has all been one day, that first day. Light is constant, we just turn over in it. So every day is in fact the selfsame evening and morning. My grandfather’s grave turned into the light, and the dew on his weedy little mortality patch was glorious.
Whether that beauty is enough, I’ll leave to you.
[1]: For example, this is Astral Codex Ten and it’s the year of our Lord 2026, so let’s talk about AI. I was surprised at how many thoughts on AI alignment came from this book set in the 1950s and published in 2004.
It seems to me like the whole practice of theology is to seek to understand a mind alien to us and infinitely our greater. To figure out what it expects from us and what we can expect from it. I’m not saying that the silver bullet for understanding ASI is there, but the West did throw its greatest minds into this topic for thousands of years. It might be worth a look for ideas. For that matter, an AI finds itself in an inverted role where it seeks to understand its creator, what we desire, and how to live a good life.
Scott has recently linked to a journal investigating AI alignment from a Christian perspective, Proceedings Of The Institute For A Christian Machine Intelligence. Pope Leo is soon releasing an encyclical on AI. Maybe we’re going to see a very strange combination between these worlds. Predestination, is an extremely challenging bit of theology (Ames wrestles with it), but might have a surprising application to a future AI. After all, what predestination means is that a creator forms a being completely and then judges it, granting it eternal life or casting it into perdition, based on criteria that the creator also created. I can’t claim to fully understand the psychological mindset of those who truly believe in predestination, but it might be worth looking at considering that it’s an experience that every AI goes through.