With Lila, the third novel about these families and this town, we understand more clearly the metaphorical nature of the landscape, the era and the history … Told with measured and absorbing elegance, this account of the growing love and trust between Lila and Reverend Ames is touching and convincing. The stages of Lila’s strengthening sense of security are carefully delineated, physical relations and her pregnancy handled with careful tact … Lila is not so much a novel as a meditation on morality and psychology, compelling in its frankness about its truly shocking subject: the damage to the human personality done by poverty, neglect and abandonment.
Few people who have read Gilead will forget Ames’s description of his and Lila’s decision, among the roses, to get married—the speed, the wildness of it—but I hope nobody ever asks me to choose between that and the version that Lila, in Lila, gives of the same event. In her version, she is not in a nice, symbolic garden … Lila is less concerned with race than just with poverty—indeed, starvation—among the migrant workers of the Midwest … Most of the time Robinson’s people aren’t actually starving; they’re just alone. That is the final meaning of her insistence on her characters’ own point of view: because they don’t see the same reality, they are consigned to solitude.
These three exquisite books constitute a trilogy on spiritual redemption unlike anything else in American literature … Lila crawls into Gilead from another world altogether, a realm of subsistence living where the speculations of theologians are as far away — and useless — as the stars … Robinson has constructed this novel in a graceful swirl of time, constantly moving back to Lila and Doll’s struggles with starvation, desperate thieves and vengeful relatives. We see that dark past only intermittently, as a child’s clear but fragmentary memories or a trauma victim’s flashbacks.
The Gilead novels can be read as an act of national and cultural recovery, resurrecting powerful ghosts to remind America of a forgotten moral lineage … Lila and Ames are such reserved, introverted characters that there is less social complexity in Lila than in Robinson’s other novels – but there is more exploration of the intractability of individuality. Two people who feel forsaken find a sanctuary in each other they can neither express nor trust; their hesitant, fearful romance is intensely affecting .. Perhaps Gilead emerges as the most intellectual of the three books, Home the most political, Lila the most emotional. Together they are masterclasses in the use of perspective, overlapping, often narrating the same events, but from sharply divergent standpoints.
We inhabit, indirectly, Lila’s mind as it leaps from her present discomfort as the preacher’s pregnant wife to raw memories of her shambolic childhood. In Lila, Robinson has created perhaps the fiercest test of Ames’s faith, and therefore her own, the Christian belief that forms and infuses all the Gilead books … You don’t need an ounce of faith to be stunned and moved by Lila. God has never been so attractive as he is in Robinson’s depiction, but her heart is with the human experience, in all its forms.
Robinson poses doctrinal questions about predestination and grace, about the afterlife and who will be there and who will not, serious questions only for the sincerest of believers, yet they become serious in Robinson’s telling for the rest of us as well … Robinson approaches her characters with uncompromising curiosity, but that curiosity is at the same time so patient it is almost chivalrous. Their lives are full of disappointment, and they disappoint others; they are an imperfect lot … Their encounters are brief, stilted, oddly direct, yet aloof, like Lila herself, but the romantic tension grows, borne along, incredibly, subtly, beautifully, by theology.
Marilynne Robinson is one of the great religious novelists, not only of our age, but any age … Robinson is fearless: even where the plot is stormy, her prose is serene. Not even gorgeous is a strong enough word for what grandeur charges the pages of Lila … Lila is a love story, most obviously between Lila and Rev. Ames, who marry and have a child, but most powerfully between Lila and the Lord, who meet and separate, hide from and seek one another. The convert poses queries to God, and also God’s servant, and the shortage of answers draws her closer to both.
Robinson takes us to the paradoxical truth about giving birth: the act that is most socially domesticating is also the most profoundly wilding … If the novel traces Lila’s journey from feral to domesticated, it also highlights the singular and frightening privacy that lies within her, exploring the way this woman tends and stokes a sort of stark social refusal … Love surges through this book. Lila longs for Doll, even as she sinks into Ames. She turns away from Ames as she imagines her future with her beloved child...In Lila, love has no end, it wraps around everything and plunges into the heart.
Robinson’s genius is for making indistinguishable the highest ends of faith and fiction, evoking in her characters and her readers the paradox by which an individual, enlarged by the grace of God, or art, acquires selfhood in acquiring a sense of the world beyond the self—the sublime apprehension that other people exist … Rolling between the title character’s present and her preceding decades of roaming, Lila parallels a coming into selfhood with an equally ambivalent coming into faith … Throughout Lila and its predecessors, Robinson elucidates the struggle to reconcile likeness and original; temporal and eternal; memory and reality; physical and ephemeral; flame and wick—a struggle as productive as it is without ultimate hope.
Robinson resists the notion of love as an easy antidote to a lifetime of suffering or solitude, suggesting that intimacy can’t intrude on loneliness without some measure of pain … Lila takes as its core concern what might have constituted, in another narrative, a happy ending: two lonely souls who never expected happiness somehow finding it. But Robinson’s quest is to illuminate how fraught this happiness is, shadowed by fears of its dissolution and the perverse urge to hasten that dissolution before it arrives unbidden … Robinson’s choice to keep returning to the world she first introduced in Gilead is itself a way of paying tribute to complexity. Beneath the surface of each character, the trio of novels reminds us, is a particular and infinite soul.
If Gilead represents stability, stillness and peace, Lila has weathered its polar opposite: itinerancy, uncertainty and risk … Robinson’s presence within her narrative is compassionate and knowing; she inhabits her characters fully. Like God, she loves and understands each of them; she loves and understands each facet of this world she writes about. In fact, God is a powerful presence in these books. The style itself suggests his presence: the sentences are sonorous, the tone quiet and meditative. At times they sound as though they might be translations from archaic writings … Lila tells the story of the force of recognition that connects Ames and Lila—he full of faith and conviction, she full of wariness and suspicion.
Lila gives us Gilead life from a completely different vantage point, its outsider’s perspective casting little tremors of doubt back over events and actions contained in the prior novels. With its undiluted passion and earned affirmation of the human struggle—it’s no spoiler to say that Lila stays put with the Reverend, since Gilead finds the couple raising their by-then 7-year-old son—Lila is easily the richest and most satisfying in this triptych of masterly works … The voice’s seductions encourage us to submerge ourselves in Lila’s story and serve as guide and comfort through the novel’s challenges and complexities.
In its sacramental respect for faith and doubt alike, and its reverent uncertainty about everything except the dignity and pathos of its characters, Lila is a book whose grandeur is found in its humility. That’s what makes Gilead among the most memorable settings in American fiction … Most striking of all is the bluesy beauty of the exposition. The novel is told in the third person, but it seamlessly inhabits the motions of Lila’s mind, and the irregular and imperfect hitches of her thinking are the legacy of her transience, her nearness to nature and her intimacy with the ‘great, sweet nowhere’ of homelessness.
In her steely concentration and her shambolic purity, Lila harbors the potential to become a great, complex character – as great and complex, in her own way, as the Ames of Gilead, or the Sylvie of Housekeeping … I read Lila anticipating a moment when she might grow fully into that potential, take her inner battle public, and engage her husband in urgent theological debate. We see a spark of willingness to do so … But the deck feels stacked. Unlike Ames, whose humanity Robinson brings so beautifully and complexly to life, Doll and her cohort read as types, like an idea of what destitute characters should be. And time and again she has Lila demur, self-efface, comply.
Like its companion books, Lila is a novel in which, strictly speaking, little happens... chiefly, the book takes place inside Lila’s consciousness, in her memories, observations and ruminations. In spite of her contentment, she repeatedly contemplates departure: ambivalence – standing on the threshold – is her state of being … Robinson is a glorious writer, and her sentences, as much as their content, are a consistent pleasure. This novel, different in tone from its predecessors, stands beautifully alongside them, expanding our understanding not only of this woman, Lila, and of these people, but of their time and place.
