From the Salmon

I have a confession to make. I’ve been holding out on you. I haven’t said a thing about Marilynne Robinson’s transcendent novel Gilead.

I picked it up in February, thanks to a recommendation from Kristen. I wasn’t too far into it before I knew that I was going to purchase it for several of my friends. Now that the copies I bought and sent have been received and opened, I can come clean.

In the meantime, all this little treasure of a book did was win the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

I won’t say too much about the characters and the plot, since said friends might have opened the book by now. But I will say this: I don’t think that I’ve ever read a book with this much heart, hope, and humility.

It’s a gentle, reflective story that unfolds slowly and engages the reader gradually. Robinson’s sublime prose, on the other hand, is evident from the start. It’s been quite some time since I read a novel that made me mutter “Wow, I wish I had written that sentence” as often as Gilead did.

While Robinson is a resplendent wordsmith, her virtuosity would be for naught if she didn’t infuse her story with a remarkably deep understanding of family and loss, ministry and mortality, and — above all — grace. This book is saturated with grace.

Gilead is a rich story about aging, about legacy, about accounting for your past. And I have to agree with greg when he says that Gilead is a book that will teach you a new lesson in each decade of your life.

But I honestly don’t think I can wait another decade before reading it again.