Lila is a
wild child. Not wholly, but in some important ways. The people supposedly
taking care of her have put her out of the house, and the cats have scratched
her because she sometimes picks them up by their tails. The house's inhabitants,
we're told, would "fight themselves to sleep." The child is 4 or 5,
long-legged, underfed. She is scooped up by a woman with a scarred face named
Doll, who keeps her safe, and fed and alive in a hand-to-mouth existence dependent
largely on migratory farm labor. The child, Lila, has no knowledge of any member
of her family until, years later, Doll apparently kills one with
her prophetically sharpened knife. Lila has no last name. The loneliness, the oddness, the separateness
of this kind of life seems impossible to imagine, but that's exactly what
novelist Marilynne Robinson does in this novel, the third of her books set in a
tiny Iowa town called Gilead. It's just a great piece of writing.
Lila follows
Doll's advice: keep to yourself, don't trust nobody; churches just want your
money. Even later in life when -- to her own enormous surprise -- she
is about to marry a considerably older minister in Gilead,
she counsels herself, "I've got to keep away from people."
Despite her
stranger's exile from civilized life, Lila is a sensitive soul with a poetic
appreciation of days spent in wild fields and meadows, camping besides streams to
drink from and wash in. In town, she cries at movies and thinks about the
stories she's seen on the screen all week. When she loses Doll, after the
latter's disastrous knife fight, and lands in a St. Louis whorehouse, she
falls in love with the only young man around, but he's exactly the type to play
with and mar the innocence of someone whose slight experience has not built up any of
the most basic defenses. His mere presence in the same part of town causes her
to give up a room-and-board cleaning job in a hotel and accept a stranger's ride
to just anywhere. She ends up on a country road in Iowa, inhaling a beauty familiar
from her wandering days and looking for dandelions, nettles, berries, roots,
fish in a stream. One thing she knows how to do is keep herself alive in a
fertile country in growing season. She finds an abandoned cabin to sleep in.
But to the minister
whose church she walks into to get out of the rain -- whom she thinks
of as "a beautiful old man," white-haired, gentle and congenitally
well-meaning -- she is simply a gift from God. We learn much more about him,
the Reverend Ames, and his soulful wrestling with the problem of existence in
Robinson's first book on this part of the world, the Pulitzer Prize winning Gilead. A widower who lost his wife in
childbirth when both were young, here he wrestles with an unexpected late-in-life
blessing. Lila sometimes sees herself as a chess piece in a game of doubt and
revelation played by Ames and his God; and she sometimes concludes that the best move for
her is out the door, but she never makes it. Ames candidly admits he can't
answer any of Lila's real questions about life: "Why are things the way
they are?" But he wants the opportunity to keep trying.
As they try
to learn how to talk to one another, Lila, who knows how to read and write but has
seldom had the opptorunity to read anything -- no room for books in a life
where you seldom own much more than the clothes on your back -- has taken to
copying out passages from the Biblical book of Ezekiel. Ames can't always
explain these visionary passages either, some of which sound to her like the
prophecy of her own life. But together they try to work out some
understanding of the afterlife -- the Christian belief in Resurrection, the miracle
of the grace of God, the meaning or value of a life that is bound to disappear.
Meanwhile a child moves in Lila's womb and the snows of the Midwestern winter
reduce life to bare essentials.
There are
passages in this book, almost every other page or so, I wish I could remember,
or "keep" in my mind in some way, but of course I won't be able to.
Nevertheless here are a few sentences, chosen almost at random near the end of
the book when Lila is once again trying to make sense of life. (Trying to make
sense of life is what Lila does):
"Can a
soul in bliss feel a weight lift off his heart?... So it couldn't matter much
how life seemed. The old man always said we should attend to the things we have
some hope of understanding, and eternity isn't one of them. Well, this world
isn't one either. Most of the time she thought she understood things better
when she didn't try. Things happen the way they do..." And in eternity,
Lila decides, "any scoundrel could be pulled into heaven just to make his
mother happy."
She has
worked her way to the doctrine of "Universalism," not a term she has ever
encountered: Everyone is saved. In my own view that's also the best way to answer
the question "why are things the way they are."
Through the
device of a character who faces life without most of the ordinary comforts and the
kinds of security most of us enjoy (such as a home, a family), Marilynne
Robinson finds a way to show us the beating heart of this life of ours.
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