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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

Customer Reviews: Read 40 more reviews...

5 out of 5 stars

Heart-wrenching, haunting, beautiful... September 6, 2008
106 out of 113 found this review helpful

This story is set in the 1950's in a small rural town in Iowa (Gilead). Robert Boughton, a retired and aging minister, is in poor health. Glory Boughton, 38, his youngest daughter, has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father and to regroup after the failure of a longstanding relationship and the evaporation of her dreams of home, marriage and children.

"I am 38 years old, she would say to herself as she tidied up after supper. I have a master's degree. I taught high school English for 13 years. I was a good teacher. What have I done with my life? What has become of it? It is as if I had a dream of adult life and woke up from it, still here in my parents' house."

Jack Broughton, his father's most beloved son, also returns home after a twenty-year disappearance - looking for peace, forgiveness, a refuge and reconciliation - with his Father, his family and a community which he ran from after earning a reputation as a thief and a scoundrel.

"Jack was exceptional in every way he could be, including of course, truancy and misfeasance."

Glory and Jack unravel their personal histories slowly - one slight pull at a time on a large ball of string. The simplicity of the story is tied with tension, heartwarming and difficult memories, conflicted emotions and most of all - with love - among family members and Father to son. Glory and Jack slowly build a relationship while caring for their Father.

The story is anchored around Jack and his relationship with his Father - a kind, graceful, forgiving man - who is elated to have his son home to settle his longstanding worries and concerns - yet other concerns have now surfaced - including how to deal with Jack's restlessness, his troubling "behaviors" - and finally his concern over Jack leaving again and being out of reach of help.

"I thanked God for him every day of his life, no matter how much grief, how much sorrow - and at the end of it all there is only more grief, more sorrow, and his life will go on that way, no help for it now. You see something beautiful in a child, and you almost live for it, you feel as though you would die for it, but it isn't yours to keep or protect. And if the child becomes a man who has no respect for himself, it's just destroyed till you can hardly remember what it was - it's like watching a child die in your arms. (He looked at Jack.) Which I have done."

My assessment:

1) One of the best books I have read. A sad but hauntingly beautiful book (or perhaps better described as a work of art) by a writer who is in a professional class of her own. I couldn't put it down.

2) Beautiful, crystal clear images and plain spoken prose.

"And there was an oak tree in front of the house, much older than the neighborhood or the town, which made rubble of the pavement at its foot and flung its imponderable branches out over the road and across the yard, branches whose girth were greater than the trunk of any ordinary tree. There was a torsion in its body that made it look like a giant dervish to them. Their father said if they could see as God can, in geological time, they would see it leap out of the ground and turn in the sun and spread its arms and bask in the joys of being an oak tree in Iowa."

3) Not for everyone. Slow Pace. Thin Plot. Deep Character insights.

If you are looking for in-your-face suspense thriller, murder mysteries, car crashes, this book won't be for you. This is quiet, gentle, artful prose that carries your interest like a gentle breeze on a warm summer day. You can feel your heart beat slow as you turn the pages - yet she pulls you along a slow moving river, wanting to see what's around the next bend - and often times it is a peek into what the characters think and feel.

4) Feels like the application of a soothing balm over a sore that won't heal.

Novel highlights the imperfections of man. The beauty, strength and pain of unconditional love. The binds of family and friends. How belief and doubt affect our daily lives. How leading the simplest life can be touched by grace, wonder and heart ache.

This is a genius work by a master craftsperson. I was sorry for the story to come to an end.

5 out of 5 stars

The Prodigal at Home September 25, 2008
31 out of 34 found this review helpful

How simple it seems, that story of the Prodigal Son! The wanderer returns; his joyful father falls on his shoulder and orders the fatted calf to be killed; the stay-at-home sibling is resentful for a while, but presumably learns to deal with it. For the story stops there. There is no tomorrow. The Bible doesn't ask what happens in the weeks and months after that. Is the family happily reunited? Does the Prodigal never yearn to be off again? Where does life go from here? These are some of the many questions posed by Marilynne Robinson in her latest novel, HOME, a sister work to her Pulitzer Prize-winning GILEAD.

HOME is not a sequel to GILEAD, but a parallel novel, taking place in the same town (Gilead, Iowa), at exactly the same time (1956), and involving many of the same characters. Readers of the earlier novel will recall that the town has two elderly preachers, John Ames and Robert Boughton, close friends since childhood. In HOME, the action shifts from Ames' house to that of Boughton, a wonderful old man magnificently characterized through his way of talking, warmly benevolent with unexpected edges of granite. At the start of the book, his youngest daughter Glory, now 38, returns home to care for her father; she appears to be in retreat from problems of her own, but their nature only gradually becomes clear. A little later, Jack Boughton, the black sheep of the family, arrives after an absence of twenty years. Jack appears in GILEAD also; some of the information from the earlier book is revealed immediately, but we learn much more about his tormented life as the book goes on. One essential revelation from GILEAD is postponed to the very last pages of HOME, so that readers who come to this book first may find the ending even more moving. For Jack, with his mixture of outward charm and inner despair, becomes a character to care for. We follow his spiritual trajectory over the next few months first with hope, then with joy, then with sympathy. This is a sad book, but by no means a bleak one.

Are there really two novels to be found in Gilead in 1956? Not quite; more like one and three-quarters. But this second book, though perhaps overlong, is entirely absorbing in its own right, and surprisingly different from its predecessor. GILEAD was a vertical book, having to do with four generations of fathers and sons, and with man's relationship to God; HOME is a horizontal one, focusing on the relationship between brother and sister, and the accumulation of memories, custom, and duties that make a home a home, whether a solace or a burden. GILEAD was broad in scope, reaching back to the Civil War and denying the apparent isolation of its characters in place and time; HOME turns inward, presenting the outside world merely as something lurking on the periphery. I was going to say that while GILEAD is primarily a religious work, HOME is a secular one, but that is not quite true; HOME does not quite have the luminous spirituality of GILEAD, yet GILEAD also seems the more down-to-earth of the two books. This reduction in range made me question giving HOME its fifth star -- and yet why not, since it pales only by comparison with GILEAD, which was a six-, seven-, or ten-star book if there ever was one?

Marilynne Robinson continues to write shining prose that compels you to keep reading, common sense expressed with scriptural overtones, as in this passage where John Ames contemplates how his friend Reverend Boughton must feel in his retirement: "The Sunday-school children were marrying, and the married couples had settled into difficult, ordinary life, and the grave old men and women who had taught the Sunday-school children about bands of angels and flying chariots were themselves crossing over Jordan one by one." If this seems as beautiful to you as it does to me, you will enjoy this moving and deeply understanding novel.

5 out of 5 stars

if you loved GILEAD..... September 3, 2008
22 out of 29 found this review helpful

You will adore HOME. Fans of Robinson's Pulitzer Prize winning novel GILEAD fell in love with her gentle minister, the Rev. John Ames, and the story he was creating for his son. Set in the 1950's, GILEAD is a love letter from the 77 year old Ames to his 7 year-old son. This luminous, tender book was completely outside the realm of what some might expect from a modern best-selling novel. Robinson shattered the mold with GILEAD.

In HOME, Robinson takes readers back once again to this quite Iowa town. It is still the 1950's. John Ames still has a bad heart. But he's alive and enjoying life with his young wife and child. HOME is not a sequel. It's more of a companion volume to GILEAD and while reading the first book first would certainly enhance the reader's appreciation for HOME, doing so is not essential.

HOME is a story about the best friend of John Ames, the Rev. Robert Boughton, and his family. John Ames is definitely part of the story but in a more peripheral sense. These two elderly ministers grew up together. They have argued scriptural fine points for the better part of a century. Rev. Boughton's health is failing now too, much faster that his friend's is declining.

Rev. Boughton's 38 year-old daughter Glory has come home to care for her father. Boughton has been a widower for 10 years. The Boughtons had seven children. Rev. Boughton's favorite child, Jack, is the black sheep of the family. He hasn't been home in 20 years. As the story opens they have just heard that Jack is coming home for a visit with his ailing father.

The prodigal son finally turns up. Jack is a man with a mysterious past. He is also one of the most compelling fictional characters this reviewer has encountered in years.

Robinson spins her magic as father, brother, and sister play out the drama of this homecoming. HOME is pure gold. Robinson writes with a warmth and assurance that will bring tears to your eyes. Will this one win another Pulitzer? It's good enough. Time will tell. HOME will resonate with readers who understand the joys and sorrows of being part of a family.

3 out of 5 stars

Minority opinion September 30, 2008
16 out of 25 found this review helpful

After listening to this audio book, and reading all the eloquent and glowing reviews about Home, I can only conclude that I've missed something. A story of relationships - father/son, brother/sister, pastor/parishioner - Home tells of Jack Boughton's attempt to come home again, to remake himself into the man his father wants him to be. Jack is clearly a very vulnerable, psychologically damaged individual, and after learning the details of his upbringing by a self-absorbed, preachy icon of a father, I can understand why. Glory is a good woman, but her own life has been barren, probably as a result of her upbringing as well. Two more guilt-ridden people would be hard to find. Both middle aged, and they are still afraid to reveal their true ("sinful") selves to Poppa, or Sir, as Jack prefers to call him.

This family drama, which is certainly a worthy subject, could do with less redundancy. The repetition of the words "I'm sorry", "very kind", and "Yes" alone contributes to some of the monotony.

So my interpretation is not of one of family reconciliation, but of sheer survival, and of pathological emotional repression. I certainly glimpsed little of the unconditional love that is supposed to infuse this book. We must not disappoint Poppa.

This version of Home was narrated by Maggi-Meg Reed, whose reading is rather expressionless and bland.

3 out of 5 stars

Possibly I am an idiot... October 2, 2008
13 out of 16 found this review helpful

...because it took me so long to realize that this was a period novel set decades ago. Home is a claustrophobic novel set in small town Iowa and peopled with devout Christians. It might as well have been set on another planet for all that I know about that world. Which doesn't make it bad--obviously--but possibly I wasn't the best reader of this novel.

Lest you think that I'm a reader unfamiliar with or unappreciative of literary fiction, that is not the case. Robinson's novel is the very definition of character-driven literature. The reason I described it as claustrophobic above is that the story revolves around only three characters, and for the vast majority of the novel, they are the only three people you encounter. The brief scenes that allowed in other characters were such a relief!

The story is told from the point of view of 38-year-old Glory, the youngest of the eight children of Reverend Robert Boughton. Glory has recently moved home to Gilead, Iowa to care for her elderly father. Gradually we learn of the disappointments of her life. The household is shaken early in the novel by a letter from one of the middle sons, Jack. Glory was still a girl when Jack left home in disgrace 20 years ago. He has not been seen and barely heard from in all the years since, to the point that no one knew if he was alive or dead.

And the family has had cause to wonder about Jack's status and whereabouts. Growing up, he was always the rebellious one. Always in trouble at home, at school, and even with the law. When Jack returns to his father's home in Gilead, explanations about where he's been, why he stayed away for so long, and why he has suddenly returned are not quickly forthcoming. Jack has clearly had a hard life. He is struggling with alcoholism. He is trying to be a better person, but he is profoundly damaged. It was mostly Jack's story, as it was gently exposed, that kept my interest in the novel. Glory was kind, steady, dependable, but a bit bland. And the father--mostly he bugged me.

A big part of my annoyance with the character of Robert Boughton was the voice used by audiobook reader Maggi-Meg Reed when delivering his lines. OMG, it was like chalk scraping against a chalkboard! And a ridiculous number of his lines either began with or consisted entirely of the word, "Yes." It was grating. I've noticed that readers of the book seem to have enjoyed the experience more than listeners of the audiobook. Possibly I would have enjoyed the experience more through my eyes than my ears, as that is typically how I consume books. But that still wouldn't have saved me from a protracted theological debate on disc seven that left me wanting to throw the book across the room. But, hey, that's me.

I wished these characters spent less time walking on eggshells and more time engaged in honest conflict. But that's not who these people were, apparently. The ending of the novel was perfect, beautifully written and moving. It made me consider adding an extra star to my review, but in the end I decided not to. There will be enough accolades for Robinson, and my honest reaction to this book was mixed. Is Home a brilliant and nuanced character study? Probably. People smarter than me seem to think so. But there were a few times that I found the dialog preposterous. The story is slow, and there's no getting around the fact that it's a downer. Am I glad I read it? Yeah. I'm so overdue reading a Robinson novel. Alas, this has not inspired me to grab up the copy of Gilead that's been sitting on my shelf for four years, but maybe I'll give Housekeeping a whirl.

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