| Home (Thorndike Press Large Print Core Series) |  | Author: Marilynne Robinson
Publisher: Thorndike Press
Category: Book
Buy New: $33.95
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Rating:  54 reviews
Sales Rank: 926110
Format: Large Print
Media: Hardcover
Edition: Lrg
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 525
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.1
Dimensions (in): 8.5 x 5.6 x 1.2
ISBN: 141040742X
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9781410407429
ASIN: 141040742X
Publication Date: September 2, 2008
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Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, September 2008: "What does it mean to come home?" In one way or another, every character in Home is searching for that answer. Glory Boughton, now 38 and lovelorn, has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father. Her wayward brother Jack also finds his way back, though his is an uneasy homecoming, reverberating with the scandal that drove him away twenty years earlier. Glory and Jack unravel their stories slowly, speaking to each other more in movements than in words--a careful glance here, a chair pulled out from the table there--against a domestic backdrop so richly imagined you may be fooled into believing their house is your own. Meanwhile, their father, whose ebullient love for his children is a welcome counterpoint to Glory and Jack's conflicted emotions, experiences his own kind of reckoning as he yearns to understand his troubled son. There is a simplicity to this story that belies the complexity of its characters--they are bound together by a profound capacity for love and by an equally powerful sense of private conviction that tries the ties that bind, but never breaks them. It's a delicate sort of tension that you think would resist exposition--and in fact these characters seem to want nothing more than, as Glory says, to treat "one another's deceptions like truth"--but Marilynne Robinson's fine, tender prose imbues this family's secrets with an overwhelming grace. --Anne Bartholomew
Product Description
Hundreds of thousands were enthralled by the luminous voice of John Ames in Gilead, Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel. Home is an entirely independent, deeply affecting novel that takes place concurrently in the same locale, this time in the household of Reverend Robert Boughton, Ames’s closest friend. 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. Jack is one of the great characters in recent literature. A bad boy from childhood, an alcoholic who cannot hold a job, he is perpetually at odds with his surroundings and with his traditionalist father, though he remains Boughton’s most beloved child. Brilliant, lovable, and wayward, Jack forges an intense bond with Glory and engages painfully with Ames, his godfather and namesake. Home is a moving and healing book about families, family secrets, and the passing of the generations, about love and death and faith. It is Robinson’s greatest work, an unforgettable embodiment of the deepest and most universal emotions.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 49 more reviews...
Gilead revisited January 4, 2009
All the sons and daughters of the Rev. Boughton dutifully return home to Gilead for Thanksgiving and Christmas, submit to the family traditions, and then quickly leave again to pursue their own lives. All but one: Jack, the prodigal son, has not been heard from in twenty years. When he suddenly turns up in Gilead, he is surrounded by mystery: Where has he been all these years? What has he been doing? Why is he coming back now?
His ailing, widowed father, whose patience and forbearance seem almost saintly, does not question him. His sister Glory, who has come home after a failed relationship, regards him warily. To these two damaged siblings, home is a refuge, but not a comfort.
Gifted. charming, reclusive Jack meets his father's attempts at reconciliation with polite evasiveness. It falls to Glory to gradually draw him out, to slowly win his trust. Her own predicament - she has been deceived and abandoned by the man she loved - serves as a distorted reflection of Jack's misdeeds, and he begins to confide in her.
He makes a brave attempt at overcoming his skepticism, but his father's certainties, the "Presbyterian probity and rectitude", get in the way. Buried resentments and old grief come bubbling to the surface. Jack chafes at his father's futile attempts to start a "conversation" with him. Called upon to say Grace before a meal or to play a hymn on the piano, he feels that he is on trial, that his performance is being scrutinized and graded. There are probing questions concerning Presbyterian theology: predestination, "election", forgiveness, damnation; God's judgment and God's grace. With his old friend, the Rev. Ames, Boughton engages in heated arguments about theological dogma and politics. Jack wonders how dogma can be reconciled with Scripture, and how the accident of birth affects destiny - but the answers he receives do not satisfy him. Lila Ames' simple belief in salvation carries more conviction than the high-flown arguments of the learned men.
This domestic struggle proceeds against the background of 1950s political and social upheaval: the Civil Rights movement, the brinkmanship of John Foster Dulles ("that nice Presbyterian gentleman"), the beginning of the Cold War, the threat of the atom bomb; and, of course, the theology of Karl Barth.
The parochialism of the town is evident: other denominations are eyed with suspicion. The Rev. Boughton has been "abroad" only once: to Minnesota, where to his consternation he found a lot of Lutherans. Anglicans are viewed with outright animosity.
There are no "colored" people in Gilead. Boughton dismisses the first stirrings of the Civil Rights struggle as a temporary problem.
The full extent of Jack's predicament is not revealed until the very end of the novel, and the outcome is uncertain.
Some situations in this story seem to me somewhat contrived - quite obviously set up to make a specific point. I did not have that problem with "GILEAD". Still, despite occasional rumblings of discontent, I found "HOME" an extraordinarily rich and rewarding novel.
 Coming Home January 4, 2009
"What does it mean to come home?"
Marilynne Robinson poses the question and her book suggests how complex that wish may be. Jack, the prodigal son and favored child of the 8 children of a small town minister in Iowa in the mid 1950s returns home after a 20 year flight. He is an alcoholic and a self proclaimed thief, who has spent time in jail and seems to exist via " the kindness of strangers" as another book memorably posits, as well as odd jobs and kind women.
This is a book that freely uses words like perdition and scoundrel and amazingly it sounds perfect. Jack's father, now dying is cared for by the other central character, Glory, the youngest daughter. Now 38, she has come home after an 8 year engagement and years of teaching school. Her fiance has left with her money and hopes.
If it all sounds grim and boring, don't buy the book. If you do, you will find yourself totally in the world of this house, and these people. Yet Robinson's gift, and it truly is a gift is that she takes the mundane and prosaic and enriches it with themes that are universal yet searingly specific to our lives today. Glory's attempts to connect with her brother are as touching and real as his retreat into irony to hide his searing pain.
Their father says to Jack "What I'd like to know, is why you didn't love us. That is what has always mystified me." And Glory reflects "Oh, it was the loneliness none of them could ever forget, that wry distance, as if there were injury for him in the fact that all of them were native to their life as he never could be."
Families, forgiveness, home and connections. Like her earlier book, Gilead, this is a book for the ages.
The Saddest Music in the World January 2, 2009
I have not read Marilynne Robinson's books, but after reading Home I intend to.
Home is a languid, terribly sad, story about the relationship between a dutiful daughter, a prodigal son and a dying father. Glory, the daughter, hurt in love, has come home to care for her aging father in the town of Gilead. Into their life comes Jack, the son who has been missing for twenty years: the criminal son, the alcoholic son, and the son the father worried about for all those years. For one summer they try to understand each other, understand the nature of failure, and understand the bond of family. Robinson has a wonderful knack for extracting the full communicative potential of small every-day actions allowing the reader to see the myriad of ways that family members speak and fail to speak to each other.
The book is set in the Midwest. The father was a Midwestern protestant minister, and the family speaks to each other in the cadences of Midwestern reserve. It is a subtle language to the uninitiated, but as rich as any other and Robinson does it as well as I have seen it done.
Glory was often brought to tears by some event or comment. She cries easily and would say about her tears, "It doesn't matter." I am a tough old man most of the time but often as I read, when a tear came to Glory's eyes a tear came to mine as well.
 Work to read........... December 29, 2008
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
I was given this book for Christmas by my husband and 7 year old son and was only able to finish it from the desire not to hurt thier feelings. The only good part about it was the feeling of accomplishment I had for sticking it out and making it through to the end. One word.... B-O-R-I-N-G
Quietly brilliant. December 15, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
In the case of a writer less gifted and more commercially driven than Marilynne Robinson, it would be tempting to conclude that HOME, set in the mid-1950s in the same small Iowa town as her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel GILEAD, represented a mercenary attempt to capitalize on the well-deserved honors accorded that book. Instead, she has accomplished the feat of reintroducing the characters of GILEAD from a fresh perspective, with a grace and wisdom that will deepen the understanding of readers of that novel and send those who first encounter her creations in this book back to its predecessor.
Unlike GILEAD, narrated by the aging Congregationalist minister John Ames in a series of letters to his seven-year-old son, HOME is written in the third-person, the story told through the sensitive, observant eyes of Glory, the youngest of eight siblings in the family of Robert Boughton, the Presbyterian minister of Gilead and a close friend, if occasional religious antagonist, to Ames.
Fresh from the failure of a lengthy relationship that damaged her both emotionally and financially, Glory, in her late 30s, has returned to the longtime family home, "this place of solemn and perpetual evening," to attend to her dying father. Into their lives returns her brother Jack, estranged from the family for some 20 years, after fleeing Gilead on the heels of fathering an illegitimate child who later dies. Jack (the godson and namesake of Reverend Ames) is the family renegade, "so conspicuously not good as to cast a shadow over their household," a recovering alcoholic who has drifted through a life of petty crime and dead end jobs. But in an essential way, Glory seems able to identify with Jack's struggles because of the way her life, too, has run aground in midstream. "Neither one of us would be here if we weren't in some kind of --- difficulty," she concedes.
The three Boughtons tentatively engage each other again in the family homestead, as Robinson expertly sketches what she calls "the intimacy of the ordinary." Jack tends to household chores, reclaiming a garden patch and restoring an ailing DeSoto. Glory anxiously eyes her brother, her thoughts balanced between the fragile hope that he's capable of making a new start and her fear of the consequences of a relapse into his old ways. Reverend Boughton's pleasure at this son's return slowly seeps away as he and Jack realize they must struggle toward a reconciliation unlikely to occur.
The narrative is tightly focused, almost microscopic in its attention to detail, and there's little in the way of dramatic action to move the plot forward. But Robinson builds tension by slowly peeling away layers to reveal enduring truths about the themes that animate both Gilead novels: the often fraught relationships between fathers and sons, the stain of racial intolerance on American life, and the rewards of religious faith and its sometime stern demands. While grounded in 1950s Middle America, the narrative exudes a feeling of timelessness, echoing biblical stories (Abraham and Ishmael, David and Absalom) sometimes explicitly discussed and other times only recognizable in the shadows.
Marilynne Robinson's work is rewarding as much for the elegant simplicity of her prose as it is for the depth and power of her themes. It's easy to linger over each sentence, chiseled as it is from hard stone. Describing the first time Jack takes the family car, on which he's lavished hours of attention, out for a drive, she writes, "Jack put his arm out the window, waving his hat like a visiting dignitary, backed into the street and gloated away, gentling the gleaming dirigible through the shadows of arching elm trees, light dropping on it through their leaves like confetti as it made its ceremonious passage." That same beauty of language is manifest in the intense level of observation Glory trains on Jack. Whether she's describing "that estrangement of his gaze, that look of urgent calculation, of sharply attentive calm" or the way he appears to her "haggard and probationary, with little of his youth left to him except the wry elusiveness, secretiveness that he did in fact seem to wear on his skin," there's a surpassing tenderness in the depiction of one sibling's love for another.
Explaining her decision, in a recent interview, to return to Gilead, Robinson said, "Those characters were just in my mind --- it was as if I could sense that there was another whole reality I could explore." There is, as she has demonstrated in this quietly brilliant work.
--- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg ([..]
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