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Glory Boughton, aged thirty-eight, has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father. Soon her brother, Jack--the prodigal son of the family, gone for twenty years--comes home too, looking for refuge and trying to make peace with a past littered with tormenting trouble and pain.Tags
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Jack Boughton is coming home. He's always been the odd one out in a large family, yet his father, Reverend Boughton, and the rest of the family couldn't help but love him and worry about him. Now, after twenty years' absence, he returns to Gilead and his father and his youngest sister, Glory, who has also returned home and is now caring for their aging father.
Many of the events of this story are also told in the companion book, Gilead. This is primarily from Glory's perspective, however, and the portrait of Jack is rather different if no less poignant. Your heart breaks for the boy - and man - who feels that he is past all redemption, who expects that behind every loving word is a rebuke. The brother-sister dynamics between Jack and show more Glory as they dance around and try not to insult each other is spot on. I couldn't help but compare and contrast this story with the parable of the prodigal son, though exactly who is the prodigal in Home could keep a conversation going for a long time. show less
Many of the events of this story are also told in the companion book, Gilead. This is primarily from Glory's perspective, however, and the portrait of Jack is rather different if no less poignant. Your heart breaks for the boy - and man - who feels that he is past all redemption, who expects that behind every loving word is a rebuke. The brother-sister dynamics between Jack and show more Glory as they dance around and try not to insult each other is spot on. I couldn't help but compare and contrast this story with the parable of the prodigal son, though exactly who is the prodigal in Home could keep a conversation going for a long time. show less
Original review 2/7/18 -- Most of the summaries and reviews of this book seem to bury the predominance of Glory's character, so when I started reading I was happily surprised to find out that the story is told from her perspective. Of course the relationship between Jack and Boughton holds sway over the plot, but it's the figure of Glory, conscientious and tearful, who I really latched onto as the heart of the thing. She embodies the whole Boughton family, both reverent and confused by religion, solitary and family-oriented, diligent and resentful. Both she and Jack are in different ways the prodigal child coming home, and both she and her father are trying to be the forgiving arms welcoming a family member back into the fold. We don't show more get quite as close to her innermost thoughts as we do with Ames in Gilead or Lila in her book, but Marilynne Robinson really is a master of writing around a character until their full shape becomes perfect and clear. I was especially enamored of the strangest and most intimate moments, like the pancakes at 3am, or Glory staying up with Jack until the bars closed, or Glory's numerous involuntary tears.
Re-read 12/17/20 -- I don't have much more to say that I didn't say above. This is such a beautiful book, and painful. I have Jack on hold at the library-- just checked and I'm 68th in line. I'm kind of nervous to read it, after loving this one and Lila so much. show less
Re-read 12/17/20 -- I don't have much more to say that I didn't say above. This is such a beautiful book, and painful. I have Jack on hold at the library-- just checked and I'm 68th in line. I'm kind of nervous to read it, after loving this one and Lila so much. show less
Upon the return of his son, Jack, from a 20-year absence, Robert Boughton, the patriarch of the Boughton family, finds with some surprise and considerable anger, that he has become old and frail. He has worked his whole life to build a home for his children, especially for his wayward son, and he's finally realizing that home isn't a place where children stay; it's a place children leave.
"All of them call it home, but they never stay," he laments.
Glory and Jack, who have both returned home to try and make themselves whole again, are discovering something similar. Home isn't a place where one can make oneself new; instead it's a place where one reverts back to childhood habits and relationships without even meaning to. It's a place of show more waiting and hoping but not of changing. To change, one must leave. And even then, the prospects for change are limited.
Robinson interwove this book beautifully with her incredible (and Pullitzer Prize-winning) Gilead. I was delighted (in kind of a dark way) with how my opinion of Jack changed in reading this book and seeing Glory's view of him from the opinion I held of him seeing only Reverend Ames' impressions of him in Gilead. Throughout most of this book, I really, really didn't like Jack. He's very manipulative and selfish. He calculates all of his actions based on how others will think of him or how he assumes they do think of him. "Truth" is a relative term to him. The nature of personal possession is similarly slippery in his estimation. He seems incapable of imagining that anyone could have a motive that doesn't relate to him. Throughout his life, he's refused closeness and comfort while condemning those around him for being distant. He makes choices that are almost guaranteed to result in failure, and then he uses the inevitable failure as further proof that he can accomplish nothing. And he pulls his family, especially his sister and his father, along with him, all the while insisting that he doesn't want their concern or their love.
He's just a jerk.
But he's also this very tragic character for whom I can't help but root even as he seems bent on failing, no matter what.
Glory, Jack's sister, still the "baby" of the large family although 38 years old, still loves her brother and seeks his approval just as she did when she was five. She tries to anticipate his needs, she lights up when something she says makes Jack laugh and is despondent when he's upset. She's something of an enabler. She's pitiful in her own way, but at least she's self-reflective. She knows she's pitiful, and she chooses to allow herself to be hurt rather than lose the tenuous connection she has with Jack.
With my description of the book as being about a jerk, an enabler, and an old man mired in self pity, this doesn't sound like a terribly glowing review. Home admittedly is heart-rending and frustrating. But it's also delicately and expertly written. And most of all it's True in the capital-T sense of the word. I was thoroughly engrossed. This, I thought, is how families work. I have the sense that I can get insights about my own familial relationships reading Robinson's work and perhaps grow more adept at recognizing the beauty in those relationships rather than only seeing the hassles and disappointments. show less
"All of them call it home, but they never stay," he laments.
Glory and Jack, who have both returned home to try and make themselves whole again, are discovering something similar. Home isn't a place where one can make oneself new; instead it's a place where one reverts back to childhood habits and relationships without even meaning to. It's a place of show more waiting and hoping but not of changing. To change, one must leave. And even then, the prospects for change are limited.
Robinson interwove this book beautifully with her incredible (and Pullitzer Prize-winning) Gilead. I was delighted (in kind of a dark way) with how my opinion of Jack changed in reading this book and seeing Glory's view of him from the opinion I held of him seeing only Reverend Ames' impressions of him in Gilead. Throughout most of this book, I really, really didn't like Jack. He's very manipulative and selfish. He calculates all of his actions based on how others will think of him or how he assumes they do think of him. "Truth" is a relative term to him. The nature of personal possession is similarly slippery in his estimation. He seems incapable of imagining that anyone could have a motive that doesn't relate to him. Throughout his life, he's refused closeness and comfort while condemning those around him for being distant. He makes choices that are almost guaranteed to result in failure, and then he uses the inevitable failure as further proof that he can accomplish nothing. And he pulls his family, especially his sister and his father, along with him, all the while insisting that he doesn't want their concern or their love.
He's just a jerk.
But he's also this very tragic character for whom I can't help but root even as he seems bent on failing, no matter what.
Glory, Jack's sister, still the "baby" of the large family although 38 years old, still loves her brother and seeks his approval just as she did when she was five. She tries to anticipate his needs, she lights up when something she says makes Jack laugh and is despondent when he's upset. She's something of an enabler. She's pitiful in her own way, but at least she's self-reflective. She knows she's pitiful, and she chooses to allow herself to be hurt rather than lose the tenuous connection she has with Jack.
With my description of the book as being about a jerk, an enabler, and an old man mired in self pity, this doesn't sound like a terribly glowing review. Home admittedly is heart-rending and frustrating. But it's also delicately and expertly written. And most of all it's True in the capital-T sense of the word. I was thoroughly engrossed. This, I thought, is how families work. I have the sense that I can get insights about my own familial relationships reading Robinson's work and perhaps grow more adept at recognizing the beauty in those relationships rather than only seeing the hassles and disappointments. show less
I may have loved this novel best of the Gilead series because I read it last, with Gilead and Lila pervading my reading of it. I may have loved it because it shows so gently how difficult it is for all of us to be in the world. Regardless, I finished it with tears--not sadness, but something like fruition or completion of all the riches of these three books in culmination.
Marilynne Robinson's writing is luminous, truthful, gorgeous, enlightening, perfect, graceful in at least two senses of the word. I loved the book Gilead and think Home is even better. For someone like me who values characterization above action, Home is wonderful to read; a book to ponder and treasure...beyond a "good read." It just seems like truth. Robinson is one of our writers who can discuss faith and theology in a believable way. This book will be too slow for many readers -- perhaps you have to have lived at a slower time and place, like Gilead, Iowa in 1956, to appreciate the pace. The main characters, the Boughton and Ames families, address each other in unfailing, exquisite courtesy, which will seem unbelievable to some show more modern readers. I was reminded of how surprised I was as a new bride (1962, North Carolina) by my husband's family's unfailing politeness to one other ("They treat each other like company!" ). The old, dying Presbyterian minister, Robert Boughton, who loves his eight children, the black sheep Jack most of all, is of course, like God the Father, though flawed in his way, and especially on the issue of race; oblivious, really, this kindly old man, of the realities of race in America, as so many were at that time, and not just in Iowa. One aches for Jack, as his sister Glory and entire family does, and one wants to shake him, too. Actually, the reader wants to shake almost every character that appears in this book at one time or another, just as one does the members of one's own family. The friendship between the two old ministers and friends is just priceless; and the scene of their having what will undoubtedly be their last communion together, pure beauty. Since a good bit of the book revolves around the family's anxiety about Jack's future, earthly and eternal, I thought the heart of the book was expressed in Glory's conclusions as she tossed and turned the night before Jack is to leave, "She thought, 'If I or my father or any Boughton has ever stirred the Lord's compassion, then Jack will be all right. Because perdition for him would be perdition for every one of us.'" show less
Home by Marilynne Robinson is an exquisite, bittersweet work of literary fiction and a deeply moving family saga. After twenty years away, the prodigal son, Jack Boughton, returns to the family home, carrying the same inner struggles that drove him away.
Robinson allows the reader to contemplate the psychological depth of her characters through ordinary moments, reflective prose, and profound moral and spiritual questions. Unconditional love remained at the forefront of my mind throughout the novel. Glory understands the troubled Jack—his fear of rejection, his sense of not belonging, his shame, self-loathing, and conviction that he is morally damaged—far better than their father, Reverend Boughton.
Robinson also cleverly uses Jack show more and Glory to mirror one another's partners, allowing the reader to gain a deeper understanding of both characters through their similarities and differences.
Although the novel is set against the backdrop of racial prejudice in mid-twentieth-century America, I do not believe that removing this external barrier would automatically resolve the psychological and spiritual conflicts Robinson presents as central to Jack's character. His deepest struggles lie within himself, making Home a powerful exploration of grace, identity, forgiveness, and the enduring complexities of family love. show less
Robinson allows the reader to contemplate the psychological depth of her characters through ordinary moments, reflective prose, and profound moral and spiritual questions. Unconditional love remained at the forefront of my mind throughout the novel. Glory understands the troubled Jack—his fear of rejection, his sense of not belonging, his shame, self-loathing, and conviction that he is morally damaged—far better than their father, Reverend Boughton.
Robinson also cleverly uses Jack show more and Glory to mirror one another's partners, allowing the reader to gain a deeper understanding of both characters through their similarities and differences.
Although the novel is set against the backdrop of racial prejudice in mid-twentieth-century America, I do not believe that removing this external barrier would automatically resolve the psychological and spiritual conflicts Robinson presents as central to Jack's character. His deepest struggles lie within himself, making Home a powerful exploration of grace, identity, forgiveness, and the enduring complexities of family love. show less
I had to skim back over my review of “Gilead” before I wrote this review. I remembered liking that book a great deal...but had to refresh my memory as to exactly why. Even if it's not fair to compare an author's current book to his/her previous one(s) – with the same characters in “Home”, it's impossible not to.
Where I found “Gilead” to be full of joy and simple wonder, “Home” is full of loss and regret and quiet but tortured grief. The feelings are just as real, but the intensity is so muted as to be almost subdued. Possibly it's because this book is in the third person, as opposed to “Gilead” - but there's something else. Again, it's the same place, the same characters, but there's something so tightly closed off show more that the reader feels at arm's length from the emotions.
I suppose I'd consider the main character of “Home” to be Glory Boughton, although the focus of the book is her brother Jack...a fact not lost on Glory. Jack, the prodigal son, has returned home, as she has, to the last part of their father's life. The book focuses on Reverend Boughton's relationship with his most beloved and most troubled child, and almost as an aside, the struggle Glory has in dealing with being constantly on the sidelines of most of the relationships of her life.
“Her whole life long that house was either where Jack might not be or where he was not. Why did he leave? Where had he gone? Those questions had hung in the air for twenty years while everyone tried to ignore them, had tried to act as if their lives were of sufficient interest to distract them...”
The time period was interesting to me. The story takes place in the 1960's, but while the rest of the country is experiencing the civil rights movement – in this small Iowa town, it feels at times if it's the 1860's. Where Glory, a 38-year old school teacher is seen as an old maid, life practically over, and where riding in a car is a major event.
Robinson's descriptions of the town and the family home are so that one can practically smell the lemon wax and sun warmed wood.
“The room was filled with those things that seemed to exist so that children can be forbidden to touch them – porcelain windmills and pagodas and china dogs...”
“She saw him put his hand on the shoulder of their mother's chair, touch the fringe on a lampshade, as if to confirm for himself that the uncanny persistence of half-forgotten objects, all in their old places, was not some trick of the mind.”
There's a sense of hopelessness in “Home”. That in a world where things are changing, sometimes faster than the world seems ready for, this town, this place, is stuck in time. The characters' lives are set, their roles in the family...their relationships with one another. No matter the fierce desire for reconciliation or recognition of past events...nothing seems to change.
“The dark little room smelled strongly of whiskey and sweat. It seemed almost domestic, and yet there was a potency of loneliness about about it like a dark spirit, a soul that had improvised this crude tabernacle to stand in the place of other shelter, flesh.”
The characters live so close to one another, but they remain so far apart that the might as well be strangers. Where in some cases home is the place where one can escape the world and be comforted and healed, this home re-opens the old wounds in ways that will never mend.
“Jack sat pondering his father, and there was something in his face more absolute than gentleness or compassion, something purged of all the words that might describe it.”
“Home” was like looking back on the past...a past that we've left behind but that these characters are trapped in. This gentle cage of home has bars that can be seen through, and sometimes reached through, but never escaped.
At least not in life they won't. show less
Where I found “Gilead” to be full of joy and simple wonder, “Home” is full of loss and regret and quiet but tortured grief. The feelings are just as real, but the intensity is so muted as to be almost subdued. Possibly it's because this book is in the third person, as opposed to “Gilead” - but there's something else. Again, it's the same place, the same characters, but there's something so tightly closed off show more that the reader feels at arm's length from the emotions.
I suppose I'd consider the main character of “Home” to be Glory Boughton, although the focus of the book is her brother Jack...a fact not lost on Glory. Jack, the prodigal son, has returned home, as she has, to the last part of their father's life. The book focuses on Reverend Boughton's relationship with his most beloved and most troubled child, and almost as an aside, the struggle Glory has in dealing with being constantly on the sidelines of most of the relationships of her life.
“Her whole life long that house was either where Jack might not be or where he was not. Why did he leave? Where had he gone? Those questions had hung in the air for twenty years while everyone tried to ignore them, had tried to act as if their lives were of sufficient interest to distract them...”
The time period was interesting to me. The story takes place in the 1960's, but while the rest of the country is experiencing the civil rights movement – in this small Iowa town, it feels at times if it's the 1860's. Where Glory, a 38-year old school teacher is seen as an old maid, life practically over, and where riding in a car is a major event.
Robinson's descriptions of the town and the family home are so that one can practically smell the lemon wax and sun warmed wood.
“The room was filled with those things that seemed to exist so that children can be forbidden to touch them – porcelain windmills and pagodas and china dogs...”
“She saw him put his hand on the shoulder of their mother's chair, touch the fringe on a lampshade, as if to confirm for himself that the uncanny persistence of half-forgotten objects, all in their old places, was not some trick of the mind.”
There's a sense of hopelessness in “Home”. That in a world where things are changing, sometimes faster than the world seems ready for, this town, this place, is stuck in time. The characters' lives are set, their roles in the family...their relationships with one another. No matter the fierce desire for reconciliation or recognition of past events...nothing seems to change.
“The dark little room smelled strongly of whiskey and sweat. It seemed almost domestic, and yet there was a potency of loneliness about about it like a dark spirit, a soul that had improvised this crude tabernacle to stand in the place of other shelter, flesh.”
The characters live so close to one another, but they remain so far apart that the might as well be strangers. Where in some cases home is the place where one can escape the world and be comforted and healed, this home re-opens the old wounds in ways that will never mend.
“Jack sat pondering his father, and there was something in his face more absolute than gentleness or compassion, something purged of all the words that might describe it.”
“Home” was like looking back on the past...a past that we've left behind but that these characters are trapped in. This gentle cage of home has bars that can be seen through, and sometimes reached through, but never escaped.
At least not in life they won't. show less
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ThingScore 92
The glories of Gilead - and of Housekeeping, for that matter - have not quite found their way into Home. One reason for this may be Robinson's decision to write in the third person for the first time, thus suppressing one of her great gifts, which is the mix of wryness, wisdom and self-deprecation with which she infused her first two narrators' voices.
added by melmore
But what remains is Gilead's sense of how character, however unkindly, determines one's fate, which in Home arrives silently but powerfully, like a glacier leaving a raw gash in the landscape. Robinson's output may also be glacial, but the force her words leave in her wake is unmistakable.
added by melmore
These ugly facts [of small-town racism] complicate the beauty of “Home,” but the way Robinson embeds them in the novel is part of what makes it so beautiful. It is a book unsparing in its acknowledgment of sin and unstinting in its belief in the possibility of grace. It is at once hard and forgiving, bitter and joyful, fanatical and serene. It is a wild, eccentric, radical work of show more literature that grows out of the broadest, most fertile, most familiar native literary tradition. What a strange old book it is. show less
added by melmore
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Author Information
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Marilynne Robinson's first novel, Housekeeping, won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. Her other novels include Mother Country and Lila. Gilead won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award and Home won the Orange Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her nonfiction books include When I Was a Child I show more Read Books, Absence of Mind, and The Death of Adam. She was the recipient of a 2012 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama. She received the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction in 2016. She has been named the winner of the Richard C Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award as part of the 2016 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. She was included on Time magazine's annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Home
- Original title
- Home
- Original publication date
- 2008
- People/Characters
- The Reverend Robert Boughton; Robert Boughton (Reverend); John Ames Boughton ("Jack"); Jack Boughton (John Ames Boughton); Glory Boughton; John Ames (Reverend) (show all 9); Reverend John Ames; Teddy Boughton; Lila Ames
- Important places
- Gilead, Iowa, USA; Iowa, USA
- Dedication
- For Noah and Elise
and for Beatrice - First words
- "Home to stay, Glory! Yes!" her father said, and her heart sank.
- Quotations
- The house embodied for him the general blessedness of his life, which was manifest, really indisputable. And which he never failed to acknowledge, especially when it stood over against particular sorrow. Even more frequentl... (show all)y after their mother died he spoke of the house as if it were an old wife, beautiful for every comfort it had offered, ever grace, through all the long years. It was a beauty that would not be apparent to every eye.
”Yes,” the old man said, as he did when memory stirred. “Those were good times.”
No, it's a feeling I have always had, almost since you were a baby. As though there was something you needed from me and I never figured out what it was. … I just never knew another child who didn't feel at home in the hou... (show all)se where he was born.
They had always been so careful of him, almost afraid to touch him. There was an aloofness about him more thoroughgoing than modesty or reticence. It was feral, and fragile. It had enforced a peculiar decorum on them all, ... (show all)even on their mother. There was always the moment when they acknowledged this – no hugging, no roughhousing could include him. Even his father patted his shoulder tentatively, shy and cautious. Whey should a child have defended his loneliness that way? But let him have his ways, their father said, or he would be gone. He'd smile at them across that distance, and the smile was sad and hard, and it meant estrangement, even when he was with them.
How all the brothers and sisters except Jack had loved to come home, and how ready they always were to leave again.
Thea all passed from cherubic infancy to unremarkable childhood to gangling youth to that adult state of Boughton-hood their mother soothed and raised with talks of character and distinction (p. 43)
Jack cleared his throat. "The protests in Montgomery are non-violent." THe old man said, "But they provoke violence. It's all provocation (p. 204)
Now I have to put all that aside and stop tormenting myself with the thought that I can do anything about--anything (p. 261).
Home. What kinder place could there be on earth and why did it seem to them all like exile? (p.282) - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)He cannot know that my whole life has come down to this moment. That he has answered his father's prayers. The Lord is wonderful.
- Blurbers
- Messud, Claire; Boddy, Kasia
- Original language*
- Anglais (Etats-Unis) (Etats-Unis)
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
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