Lila (Oprah's Book Club): A Novel

"Spread your wings over your servant, for you are a redeemer." Ruth 3:9

What happens when an old man, broken from years of suffering, looks into the face of a feral woman who has wandered into his church for shelter? In this moving story, he sees humanity in her face. He sees her loneliness and her sin-ravaged state, but he can see beyond that to a human being, ruined, but not beyond the hope of a redeemer. She is a person in need of compassion and comfort. He offers her a home for her world-weary frame. He marries her.

The story of Lila finds its poetic power in Robinson's unmatched ability to empathize with the human condition. Each page of this story is dripping with compassion and sympathy. The genius is how the very fabric of the story weaves a picture of the deepest desires of every human heart.

Lila, at her core, is a person in desperate need of protection and affection. Here Robinson proves herself to be a master of symbolism. When a shawl is spread over the sickly, neglected, and dying toddler Lila, by a wretched woman overcome by compassion for an unloved child, this shawl and this memory become the defining features of Lila's life. And later, as a forsaken, hopeless, and forlorn grown woman, who has now lost the one person in the world who ever cared for her, Lila finds again someone spreading his dark suit jacket, the one he preaches in, over her freezing shoulders as they walk along the road. Lila says, looking back on that moment: "She thought it was nothing she had known to hope for and something she had wanted too much all the same." A covering, a home, protection. And again: "But if she had prayed in all the years of her old life, it might have been for just that, that gentleness. And if she prayed now, it was really remembering the comfort he put around her, the warmth of his body still in that coat. It was a shock to her, a need she only discovered when it was satisfied, for those few minutes." This story brings to life the theme that we often don't even know what to pray for and that mercy is so much bigger than our imagination.

Robinson is an author who truly understands how to express suffering, estrangement, loneliness, and courage in a breath-taking and lovely story of grace and redemption. She has a deep perceptiveness in the way she portrays the various motives that control the human heart and she writes with forthrightness and blazing accuracy--most of the time.

But this book is not without faults. In this story, she allows her gift of empathy and pity and compassion for the lost to lead her astray and down the road to universalism--the belief that everyone will be in heaven. Lila cannot bear the thought that her beloved adopted mother Doll, the one who had compassion on her when she was a sickly child, did not know about God. When Lila asks the preacher where she is, he caves. He admits he can't bring himself to believe in a hell. In the closing the chapters of the book, Lila imagines everyone who has been kind to her, and even someone who has been cruel to her, all in heaven, and only at this point she begins to believe in heaven. But here Robinson is failing to take her own advice. In several points in the book, Ames tells Lila not to concern herself with things that are too great for her to understand. This would have been an appropriate place to say that again. Ames should have said: Will not the judge of all the earth do what is right? That is the only appropriate answer to Lila's question. There is One who sees all things, knows all things, and nothing escapes his notice. He is impartial and he is merciful. We can have complete faith that he will do what is absolutely right in the end.

But even as Robinson fails miserably in this one point, it does not spoil the whole book. This is not the central theme of the book and I found it easy to look past. There is so much that is still good and beautiful about the book, it was well worth the read in spite of this one fault.

Born into filth, decay, neglect and apathy, Lila's early childhood is spent hiding under a table in an unwatched corner of a small cabin playing with a makeshift doll made from a walnut shell. It seems the only soul in the world who cares for her is a drifter named Doll, who for reasons not mentioned is also living in the cabin. It is Doll that finds her under the table in the evenings as the temperatures drop, and covers her with a shawl, snuggling with her to keep her warm. It is Doll who tries to ensure that Lila eats and who tries to do more than just acknowledge her existence. When the neglect reaches a point Doll can no longer bear, she absconds with a very ill Lila, saving her life, and raising her as her own. Though Lila has Doll's love, she doesn't have much else as they drift from town to town just before and throughout the depression. As the hard times get harder, they fall in with a group of men and women and work odd jobs while living a homeless lifestyle fraught with danger.

Lila gets only a bit of a grade school education, and is found to be very intelligent by a well meaning teacher who begs Doll to keep Lila enrolled in school. But the economy demands that Lila and Doll continue drifting to survive and Lila never receives further formal education. She does learn a strong work ethic of which she is very proud and which, she states frequently, has aged her and that she wears on her face. Lila makes it clear throughout the novel that she sees herself as worn out, plain, with a hard face, and she often reminisces about others who have told her the same.

When Lila arrives in Gilead, Iowa (Doll no longer her guide in life), she begins to interact with the characters familiar to readers of Robinson's other masterworks, Gilead, and Home. It is not necessary to have read those two novels to appreciate Lila, but they do add a valuable perspective. When Lila meets the incomparable Reverend John Ames, she finds herself confronted with a kindness never before experienced in her lifetime and which she finds so shocking, she repeatedly tries to retreat into her survival reactions of anger, mistrust, and escape. But a kind of spiritual attraction forms; the Reverend sensing a good in Lila that she has had to suppress to survive, and Lila sensing a sincerity and empathy in Ames that she wants to believe is real.

As the two interact, an oddly beautiful love forms, and Robinson weaves a masterful story in which the two take on the deep mysteries of existence, at first in their brief and awkward conversations and progressing into simple but profound discussions. Lila slowly reveals some of the horrors of her past life, and the elderly Ames demonstrates his trademark empathy, and that ability Robinson gives him to boil his Christianity down to its very essence. These discussions are so beautifully written, so powerfully spiritual, that you'll find yourself reading and rereading whether you are a person of faith or not.

Lila and John are married, but the marriage has a tenuous feel as Lila keeps her escape option open seemingly at all times, wondering if all is too good to be true. Reverend Ames acknowledges her fears throughout their time together, and works tirelessly to keep her trust, and convince her that she is loved and worth loving. As more and more is revealed about Lila's background, the reader, along with Reverend Ames, gains an increasingly greater respect for what Lila has endured, and for what she has become.

With Lila, Marilynne Robinson has cemented her legacy as one of the greatest American authors of our lifetime. Lila is every bit as powerful and beautiful as the other two Gilead based novels, and while the theology, philosophy and characters make for a fascinating read, it is Robinson's ability to get to that place, that essence of what it means to be a good person no matter one's faith or lack thereof, that makes her novels so worth reading. She is a master illustrator of the good in humanity, all the while acknowledging the muck and decay amid which it is found.

Lila is absolutely a 2014 must read, and has already been nominated for the National Book Award. It is likely to receive heavy consideration for all of this year's major awards. I highly recommend it.

I love all Marilynne Robinson's books. They are so moving and thoughtful that I have marked many pages for reference. Often I am inspired to look things up and do further research. This is a profoundly sad story full of questions about humanity yet full of deeply moving inspiration. I don't know how she does it but I am grateful for talented writers like Robinson.

Gilead was a letter from Rev. John Ames (Congregationalist) to his son, John, to be read by John when he was an adult. The father died when the son was 7 years old. Home was the story of John Ames’ closest friend, Rev. Robert Boughton (Presbyterian), and his seven children, including Jack, the prodigal son, and Teddy, who becomes a doctor. Lila is the story of Rev. John Ames’ second wife. His first wife, Louisa, died with their infant daughter, Angela Rebecca, of an illness (scarlet fever?). Lila doesn’t know who her parents were. Her earliest memories are of neglect and fear in a house with other people, including an older girl, Doll, who works at night as a prostitute. Doll kidnaps Lila to save her and they lead a nomadic life trying to avoid detection by anyone who might be searching for them. They spend some it in a house belonging to an old woman who hires Doll as a housekeeper and who helps Lila recover from an illness. Lila recovers, The old woman’s son and family come to live, so there is not enough work for Doll. At the next house they stay with a gang where Doane is the leader, Marcelle his wife, Mellie is a girl about Lila’s age, and others. Doll stabs a man who might be Lila’s father (it is uncertain, but probable, that he died) and eventually leaves Lila because she thinks Lila would be better off away from her and her flight from police. Lila keeps the knife Doll used. Throughout the rest of the book, it is symbolic of her love for Doll, and her need to find Doll. Lila lives for awhile in a brothel in St. Louis. Eventually, she ends up in a vacant house in Gilead, then is befriended by Rev. John Ames. They eventually marry, despite his advanced age, and have a baby, John Ames. Lila remains scarred by her upbringing, has trouble trusting people, and yet feels drawn to her past, especially her need to find Doll. The knife is symbolic of her love of Doll, and it is the only thing she has that is hers alone. I rate this 4 out of 5 stars. Characterization is excellent. Setting is well drawn for the reader. Plotting is complex and believable. It is difficult at times to grasp the leaps back and forth in the time line. The omniscient narrator’s movement from one mind to another, from one point of view character to another, is well handled. In one section toward the end of the book there is a long passage of Lila’s musings, which felt long to this reader. What carries the story the most, and engages the reader effectively is the deep and complex characterization.

Marilynne Robinson’s third of her novels set in Gilead, Iowa in the middle of the 20th century focuses on the quiet, much younger wife of the elderly Reverend John Ames. Lila was seen peripherally in ‘Gilead’ and then appeared in ‘Home’ sporadically in visits between the Ames and Boughton families in which she spoke rarely but, when she did, offering comments of simple wisdom. ‘Lila’ depicts her deprived, poverty-stricken and rootless life before and after she meets Ames.

Though no definite year is given for when most events occur, Lila is a very young, abused and neglected little girl of about four or five, presumably in the early years of the Depression. Knowing the family a bit and seeing the abuse first hand, a lady known only as “Doll” abducts her from the family and looks after her with more motherly love and protection than Lila’s own mother ever did. Doll is the child’s only home and source of security when they begin their roaming, migrant life.

They get sporadic work with a makeshift family consisting of a man named Doane and his wife Marcelle, and another family that has a child named Mellie. Like the families in ‘The Grapes of Wrath’, they move from place to place somewhere in the vicinity of Kansas or Missouri. Lila is not even Lila’s real name, which she never knew, just one that Doll likes.

Doll is a fierce protector of Lila and eventually kills a man with her knife. Lila wonders if this man was her real father but is never certain. Doll gives her the knife after she is arrested, just before Lila has to move on. She carries the knife like it’s a holy amulet, the only possession she treasures.

The novel is seen through Lila’s point of view and switches back and forth from her adult life back to her childhood, eventually filling in most of the blanks between when her life with Doll began and the time that she sought shelter from a storm in the sanctuary of Ames’ church in Gilead. She had been wandering until she found a shack outside the town which did little to keep out the rain.

The romance and subsequent marriage between Lila and Ames takes a wary yet curious trajectory before either of them can settle into a position approximating security. Lila has had to build up defenses around herself and not depend on any possible bonds or circumstances that might be ripped out of her life. Doll was her center but then Doll was taken out of her life. At some point she ended up in a brothel in St. Louis but never was successful as a prostitute so the madam, only known as “Mrs.”, decided to let her stay on for a while as a cleaning lady.

All of these episodes in Lila’s past life are presented glancingly and never really in their context in the linear chain of cause and effect of personal backstory. When she appears in Ames’ life, he sees her arrival as a gift of Grace. He has lived the same solitary life for forty years since his first wife died in childbirth along with their baby. He offers Lila food, shelter, and as much understanding as she requires, without making reciprocal requests.

Lila is wary of his theology. She cannot accept that Doll, or herself for that matter, will be consigned to everlasting Hell for doing nothing but attempting to survive and live in peace. She is relieved to find that Ames doesn’t adhere to that view either. “Thinking about hell doesn’t help me live the way I should. I believe this is true for most people. And thinking that other people might go to hell just feels evil to me, like a very grave sin. I don’t want to encourage anyone else to think that way. Even if you don’t assume that you can know in individual cases, it’s still a problem to think about people in general as if they might go to hell. You can’t see the world the way you ought to if you let yourself do that. Any judgment of that kind is a great presumption. And presumption is a very grave sin. I believe this is sound theology, in its way.”

Lila replies, “I don’t understand theology. I don’t think I like it. Lots of folks live and die and never worry themselves about it.” Ames sympathizes and realizes that he’s preached and talked theology with Boughton for too many years to remember that there are people in the world like Lila.

Lila’s perpetual wanderlust and rootlessness even emerges in her consciousness while she is pregnant, thinking that she’ll stay with Boughton through the birth and reserve the right to take her baby and leave him. However, she gradually accepts that his kindness and love for her will only disappear once he dies, which she doesn’t want to dwell on as long as she doesn’t have to.

After the birth Boughton insists on baptizing the baby as soon as possible. Unlike Ames, is a fierce believer in baptism to rescue someone, even an innocent newborn infant, from eternal hellfire. He felt the same grief regarding his own son in the previous novel. Christian theology is still a current running through ‘Lila’ just as it had in ‘Home’ and, to the largest extent, ‘Gilead’, but that just seems to be part of the territory with Robinson’s ‘Gilead’ novels, especially if a minister is one of the main characters.

I said regarding ‘Home’ that each of Robinson’s novels have very small casts of characters. That still holds for ‘Lila’. Even though other characters appear at various points in Lila’s pre-Gilead/Ames life such as Doane and Marcelle and Mellie in the migrant days or Mrs. and her set of prostitutes in the St. Louis brothel, none of them are anything more than background. ‘Lila’ is essentially a two-character novel. These dialectical pairs of characters seem to be the major colors of the pallet from which she paints her word canvases.

Lila has absorbed some generosity of spirit in spite of her distrust of humans. Once when she returns to her shack, she finds a very dirty boy sleeping in her shack. The main things of value for her in that shack are some dollar bills and that heirloom knife. The boy got fed up with his violent father, smashed his head with a skillet, and ran off, thinking he has killed him. He is very frightened. She gives him the money but insists that he return the knife to her. Although she thinks of that boy as the thief on the cross beside Jesus, she did what she could for him, embodying Jesus’ dictum, “If you’ve done it to the least of these, you’ve done it to me.”

At the end, Lila maintains a semblance of balance between faith and defense. She tells Ames that she’ll keep the knife with her. She knows she’s brought a helpless child into “a world where a wind could rise that would take him from her arms as if there were no strength in them at all.” For now, she has geraniums in the window and peace in her heart and with her new family, for however long it lasts.

Marilynne Robinson’s deeply poetic “Lila” is the most anticipated literary novel published this fall. The third novel of the “Gilead” trilogy may well be the defining novel of the trilogy as well as her career. She could possibly receive a second Pulitzer as Updike did with his Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy in the eighties. But the novel poses serious problems for the average reader as the narrator bores, in an excruciatingly slow and repetitive process, into the mind of Lila as she grapples with the changes in her life and tries to find meaning in a struggling life she never chose. Don’t get me wrong; I think Robinson is one of our most gifted contemporary writers, on a par with Roth and Brooks, and her book “Gilead” one of our best contemporary novels, but readership will be limited.

Robinson’s writing reflects the strong, subtle themes of the 1930’s classic modernists, with a certain veil of Dostoyevsky’s existentialism, in a voice that creates a Midwestern regionalism in the Southern tradition. She explored some of the themes in her book of essays “The Death of Adam.”

The small mythical town of Gilead, Iowa, named after the biblical town in Jordan whose green valley heals and comforts, is a slowly declining town in the 1950’s located a few miles from the real town of Tabor, Iowa in southwest Iowa. Following the Second Great Awakening religious movement of the 1820’s, abolitionist preachers, the Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Methodists and Baptists, migrated to Iowa and in the 1850’s, formed an active Underground Railroad and hid and fed John Brown as his raiders launched murderous raids into Bleeding Kansas to fight the spread of slavery to Kansas. This back story frames the themes of the trilogy.

The three books of the “Gilead” trilogy revolve around two preachers in 1950’s Gilead, John Ames, a Congregationalist minister, and his dear friend, Boughton, a Presbyterian minister. The books become a history of change in American theology over the hundred years from the Civil War to the 1950’s, delving into themes of the just war, passivity, moral hypocrisy and concluding with goodness.

In the third book, Ames, now in his seventies, falls in love with a migrant worker in her late thirties, Lila, who he marries and who bears the son to whom he writes a letter in the first book. In this book, Robinson explores Christianity, the need, the doubt, grace, goodness, contradiction, acceptance, salvation, as John reaches out in goodness to an itinerate laborer of the Depression. After her father abandoned her, a woman takes Lila to join a group of migrant workers in the 1930’s, travelling on foot from town to farm, begging for work for food. The migrant group becomes a nomadic tribe as the Depression begins to unravel the American fabric, a tribe that harkens back to the impoverished tribes in the hills and plains of Galilee. The tribes lived a life of destitution and hopelessness, and it was to these tribes that Jesus preached his message of hope. Lila and her tribe lived a life of survival, holding onto the tribe to give them a foundation and community in their life. But they lived a life of dread and constant fear of abandonment, the women carrying knives for protection in the camps at night, as Robinson spreads the veil of existentialism. When the tribe eventually dissolves, Lila wanders into Gilead and preacher Ames reaches out to her. The rest of the book moves in and out of Lila’s head, her thoughts, her memories, the narrator’s interpretation, conversations with Ames. Robinson, one of our greatest prose writers, exhausts the story of Lila’s dread and fear, that Dostoyevsky existentialism, existing just to exist with no foundation of meaning, surviving with no purpose as Lila grapples with the Christian meaning of existence and the conflicting concept of an omnipotent God and the suffering of innocents.

While Robinson crafts a story of great literature, the story moves slowly as Lila tries to reconcile John’s teaching to her life as a migrant. Far too slow. The novel is short, but the repetitive review of her previous life, and the endless discussions with Ames, trying to understand Christianity, the endless repetition, will turn off many readers; it becomes a slog at times.

I'll be brief. Begins beautifully with mesmerizing prose. It drags too long, repeating and repeating the same thoughts over and over again. The massive repetitious flashbacks obscures the story, which is a love story, in which nothing much happens, except for a blizzard at the end, which does no harm to anyone. This is more a fable and lacks vital details. For example: How did Lila feel when she had to sell her body to ugly, dirty men? I think it was Chekhov who said if you hang a gun on the wall in the first act, it has to shoot someone at the end. The knife--Doll's and then Lila's occupies many pages of the novel, but alas, at the end does nothing, even slicing an apple. Overall, this could be a great novella, if the editor had suggested to Ms. Robinson to cut two third of the book. The language would glow and the interesting relationship between a young woman and an old man would become the focus of the narrative. I had read House Keeping and for years cherished the memory of that reading. Unfortunately, I wanted to put this book down many times, especially when the same memory repeated or another quote from the Bible halted the narrative.