Home begins simply, eschewing obvious verbal fineness, and slowly grows in luxury—its last fifty pages are magnificently moving, and richly pondered in the way of Gilead. Home is not a sequel to that novel but more like that novel’s brother, since it takes place at the same narrative moment and dovetails with its happenings … What propels the book, and makes it ultimately so powerful, is the Reverend Boughton, precisely because he is not the soft-spoken sage that John Ames is in Gilead. He is a fierce, stern, vain old man, who wants to forgive his son and cannot.
Gilead and Home stand together, in part, as twinned portraits of these godly, elderly patriarchs … Even as Robinson’s deep and unsentimental fondness for Ames and Boughton is as evident as their devotion to each other, her judgment of them and what they represent is uncompromising and severe. Home is a book full of doubleness and paradox, at once serene and volcanic, ruthless and forgiving. It is an anguished pastoral, a tableau of decency and compassion that is also an angry and devastating indictment of moral cowardice and unrepentant, unacknowledged sin … Home and Gilead are marvelous novels about family, friendship and aging. But they are great novels — or perhaps two installments in a single, as yet unfinished great novel — about race and religion in American life.
Robinson moves beautifully into and out of Glory’s thoughts; indeed, she works almost as if Glory were a first-person subject. We never enter the mind of another character, but from dialogue we can guess at the changes in their thoughts. The limited third person may express a kind of conviction on Robinson’s part; certainly, it accords with Glory’s heart-laboring attempt to see into the lives of others … Robinson attends to permanent departures, and these acts of rupture condense that condition of not knowing, of never being able to know, that she sees in all of our understandings.
As Gilead demonstrated, Ms. Robinson is better at describing spiritual yearnings and the metaphysics of faith than she is at mapping complicated psychological relationships. At the same time Home lacks the fablelike intensity and visual, metaphoric dazzle of her much-loved first novel, Housekeeping. Instead Home gives us scene after scene of Jack and Glory — and sometimes their father — talking to each other about their doubts and regrets and failed dreams. This results in a static, even suffocating narrative in which very little is dramatized, and much is recalled secondhand, and it makes the characters, especially Jack, seem terribly self-absorbed.
Robinson has constructed a plot so still that it seems at times more a series of tableaux than a novel. The tension in Home is palpable but invisible … Even more than their stylistic beauty, what's miraculous about Gilead and Home is their explicit focus on spiritual affliction, discussed in the hard terms of Protestant theology. Robinson uses the words ‘grace,’ ‘salvation’ and ‘prayer’ frequently and without embarrassment and without drifting into the gassy lingo of ecumenical spirituality. Her characters cower in the shadow of perdition … As a disquisition on the agonies of family love and serial disappointment, Home is sometimes too illuminating to bear.
In Gilead, Robinson's slow, meditative prose suited the elderly Ames' voice and ruminations, which seemed to push into the past as if through dark water. Home is a faster and choppier read, with short bursts of darkly ironic dialogue that suit its younger protagonists … If Gilead was about tests of faith, Home is about where, and what happens when, one searches for redemption. Readers who enjoyed the stately, philosophical pace of Gilead may be surprised to find themselves in a house with two squabbling siblings, their fears and angers as raw as if they were still teenagers.
In both Home and Gilead, Robinson appears to be considering (among myriad themes and issues) the ravaging, irremediable loneliness of the unbeliever. She embeds her inquiry in a lode of theological history, and a nest of comforting physical details. Home's deepest pleasures may come from the exchanges (which form the novel's body) between Glory and Jack – tentative, difficult, sore with love, anguish, insight, told through Glory's exquisitely nuanced perceptions in clean, simple, luminous language (Robinson's prose soothes and calms, itself a balm) … We may hope, Home finally suggests, that things will one day settle, in unanticipated ways. Robinson loves the word ‘settle,’ and by it she does not mean resignation.
One of Home's pleasures is watching Glory and Jack rediscover each other after years of separation and misunderstanding. Each possesses a wry, almost mordant sense of humor; for such a serious writer, Robinson can be very funny. Through hardship and humor, these two siblings find in one another an empathy unique to those in the same gene pool, shouldering a similar burden of parental expectations. But Home has more serious aims, and they're centered on the Rev. Boughton. In decline, he still speaks with two voices: that of a loving father, and the voice of a God taking the measure of lives fallen short of perfection.
For Glory ‘home’ is less a place than a difficult journey. And sometimes it is a place along the journey – a ‘home’ that she creates for her older brother and father … Glory is a reserved person, and this is a quiet and slowly paced book. But there are also many surprising turns and pivots in the plot line that ratchet up the tension … Thus it is Jack and Glory's complex relationship, their delicately nuanced voices and silences, their fragile yet sustaining love, that form the thematic heart of the book.
There is much to admire about Home. It is beautifully written, studded with vivid snapshots … But there are problems. One is tempo: It is an unrelenting, unvarying largo. Then there are the three central characters … We are left with Glory and Jack, irrevocably crippled by their upbringing. Unfortunately, Robinson has not done nearly enough to make either of them interesting in their misery. Glory's endless second-, third- and fourth-guessing of her every least thought and action, to say nothing of her propensity for tears, grows exasperating … Gilead could well be the most boring place on Earth.
