This week, Vulture will be publishing our critics' year-end lists. 1. Lila, by Marilynne Robinson “Who in the world could need help with a chair?” This is what the protagonist of Marilynne Robinson’s new novel wonders when her husband pulls out her seat at the table. So much of Lila is present in that sentence: her pride, her self-reliance, her mistrust of kindness, and the way that — in her feral, gifted, autodidact’s mind — a profound alienation from society turns anthropologically keen. Readers of Robinson’s 2004 Gilead have met this character before, through the eyes of that husband, the Reverend John Ames. Now, in Lila, we hear her story directly. Born into poverty and neglect, abandoned by her meager community in the worst of the Dust Bowl years, Lila would be as low and aimless as dust itself — but for her mind, and her huge and startling will.
- 12/10/2014
- by Kathryn Schulz
- Vulture
Marilynne Robinson has written three novels. Her first, Housekeeping, was written in 1980 and nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. It was over 20 years before her second novel, Gilead was published, and also nominated for a Pulitzer. Gilead is written from the point of view of Reverend John Ames and is an account of his life for his 7-year-old son. Home is its companion, telling the same events from different perspectives. Ames still features, but the focus is now on his neighbour Robert Boughton and his children Glory and Jack, who have both recently returned home. Jack has always been unreliable and something of a disappointment to his father, who worried for the state of his son's soul. Glory is the peacemaker, living her own nightmare of returning to the town of Gilead and becoming stuck there. Her other siblings may want their home to stay exactly as it was in their memories,...
- 4/28/2010
- by Dustin Rowles
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