Book Reviews
Home and Gilead are marvelous novels about family, friendship and aging. But they are great novels—or perhaps two installments in a single, as yet unfinished great novel—about race and religion in American life…[Home] 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 literature that grows out of the broadest, most fertile, most familiar native literary tradition. What a strange old book it is.
A.O. Scott - New York Times
Writing one novel about a minister's family is asking for trouble; writing a second seems downright unrepentant, the kind of misjudgment that could land a reputable literary author in a Christian bookstore or with a cozy series on the BBC. But Robinson, who teaches at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, is unlikely to suffer either fate; her books are toxic to sentimentality. Even more than their stylistic beauty, what's miraculous about Gilead and Home is their explicit focus on spiritual affliction, discussed in the hard terms of Protestant theology. Robinson uses the words "grace," "salvation" and "prayer" frequently and without embarrassment and without drifting into the gassy lingo of ecumenical spirituality. Her characters cower in the shadow of perdition.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
(Starred Review) Robinson's beautiful new novel, a companion piece to her Pulitzer Prize–winning Gilead, is an elegant variation on the parable of the prodigal son's return. The son is Jack Boughton, one of the eight children of Robert Boughton, the former Gilead, Iowa, pastor, who now, in 1957, is a widowed and dying man. Jack returns home shortly after his sister, 38-year-old Glory, moves in to nurse their father, and it is through Glory's eyes that we see Jack's drama unfold. When Glory last laid eyes on Jack, she was 16, and he was leaving Gilead with a reputation as a thief and a scoundrel, having just gotten an underage girl pregnant. By his account, he'd since lived as a vagrant, drunk and jailbird until he fell in with a woman named Della in St. Louis. By degrees, Jack and Glory bond while taking care of their father, but when Jack's letters to Della are returned unopened, Glory has to deal with Jack's relapse into bad habits and the effect it has on their father. In giving an ancient drama of grace and perdition such a strong domestic setup, Robinson stakes a fierce claim to a divine recognition behind the rituals of home.
Publishers Weekly
This follow-up to Robinson's Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead (2004) is a concurrent narrative rather than a sequel, as if the earlier novel's journal entries had concluded with "Meanwhile...." The plot here concerns the large family of elderly Rev. Robert Broughton, specifically two of his adult children, who have returned to Iowa temporarily. Youngest sister Glory keeps house for her dying father, but her efforts are eclipsed by the reappearance of bad-boy favorite child Jack Ames Broughton two decades after a scandalous departure. Pain-filled and mysterious, Jack reengages uncomfortably with relations and neighbors, forcing them to confront perhaps unbearable truths about themselves and society. In Robinson's characteristically calm, measured language, the author creates three-dimensional characters that move believably within beautifully realized physical and psychological space as they confront (and challenge the reader with) deeply serious questions of faith, moral responsibility, and the racial divide in America. Fans of Gilead will be grateful for this expansion of the story—and for its closing hint of a possible return to the extended Ames/Boughton families, whose two small sons will carry their complicated heritage into the cultural revolutions of the 1960s. Highly recommended for all fiction collections.
Starr E. Smith - Library Journal
Home takes its place alongside Robinson's 2004 novel Gilead. Less its sequel than its counterpart, it tells the concurrent story, set in 1956, of Reverend Robert Boughton, best friend to Gilead's narrator, John Ames. Where Gilead was a self-reckoning in the guise of an epistolary novel — it takes the form of a letter to Ames's young son — Home is a structurally more traditional, simmering novel about the fragility, and endurance, of familial bonds. Here, Ames recedes into the background as Robinson shifts her focus to Boughton's wayward son Jack, who has returned home after a 20-year absence just as his father's health begins to fall into an irreparable decline. Jack will be familiar to readers of Gilead; in that novel, he played Ames's moral foil, the man whose presence reveals the blind spots in the reverend's seemingly boundless capacity for grace. Also returned to the family homestead is Jack's younger sister Glory, who has come to nurse the ailing Boughton and, more painfully, to seek refuge from a failed engagement. The coincidence of their homecomings gives rise to an unlikely friendship between the two siblings; Glory, with her preternatural sensitivity, proves the only person able to draw out Jack, whose guarded manner and sardonic evasions do little to conceal the ravages of his alcoholism and troubled childhood.
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