In narrating his ‘own long experience’ (45) of life through the lens of God’s grace, the spiritually attuned Ames can show his son how, even in moments of ‘deep darkness’, such as the death of his first wife and child in childbirth, ‘a miracle was preparing’ (63) in the form of his second wife, Lila. 4 From its opening, the novel’s terms are clearly established, and as readers we become, in effect, Ames’ son, allowing our attention to be guided by his ‘fatherly wisdom’ (45). 3 As Lynne Hinojosa notes, such autobiographies pay close attention to particular life experiences in order to show readers ‘how God’s truth and guidance were present both in one’s life and in history’. The novel’s epistolary form has its origins in a long-standing tradition of spiritual autobiographies and a more specific history of Puritan New Englanders addressing letters to their children.

Gilead thus invites readers into a deeply mediative space in which they can recognise their own failures of attention, in the hope of encouraging a more just and ethical engagement with the world. 2 By depicting Ames’ struggle to recognise how his perception has been blurred by inattentiveness, Robinson shows readers how even a devout minister who has dedicated his entire life to carefully watching the world can suffer from serious lapses in judgement. By demonstrating the link between ‘reverent attention to this world’ and ‘the imperatives of ethical refinement’, Robinson makes clear that such inattention ultimately results in apathy towards pressing political conflicts, in particular, the nascent civil rights movement. However, in remaining confined to Ames’ solipsistic perspective, the novel makes clear that there are elements in his life which he fails to attend to properly, including his family’s relationship to America’s abolitionist past and the position of his estranged godson and namesake, John Ames (Jack) Boughton. By inviting his son to notice the ways in which the world continually evades our conceptual (and linguistic) grasp, Ames urges humility and child-like reverence over narrow-minded judgements and dogmatic certainties. 1 Within these letters, Ames is keen to demonstrate the value of careful attention and quiet reflection in revealing life’s inherent mystery specifically, he insists that apparently ordinary events can ‘shine like transfiguration’, provided one brings ‘a little willingness to see’ (280). The novel (the first in a tetralogy of interrelated novels) takes the form of a letter from John Ames, an ailing Congregationalist minister, to his son Robby with the ostensible aim of providing a ‘begats’ of his family’s life. One of Marilynne Robinson’s central concerns in her 2004 novel, Gilead, is the nature and forms of human attention: who and what we pay attention to, and, crucially, what we fail to pay attention to.

Gilead robinson review