Lila: A Novel
By Marilynne Robinson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 272 pages
Marilynne Robinson’s phenomenal fourth novel (published 34 years after her first, Housekeeping) begins with a cast-out child: “Somebody had shouted, Shut that thing up or I’ll do it! and then a woman grabbed her out from under the table by her arm and pushed her out onto the stoop and shut the door and the cats went under the house…She was afraid to be under the house, and afraid to be up on the stoop, but if she stayed by the door it might open.” Nameless and unwashed, this poor feral creature is abused by everyone save a woman named Doll, who scrubs at the dirt on her face, covers her with a shawl, leaves her a little food and a cup of water, and even gives her a toy: “It was just a horse chestnut with a bit of cloth over it, tied with a string…The child whispered to it and slept with it under her shirt.” And then Doll steals her one night and carries the child away from the vile flophouse that is the only home she has ever known.
The child nearly dies of fever. Doll nurses her through her sickness, begs her to stay alive. And gradually, as the child recovers, the world comes into focus. Doll breaks her of her wildling habits (she bites her own flesh until she bleeds; the only words she knows are curses and insults, spat without understanding). Slowly, she begins to act human, though it will be some time before she ventures to speak. She is given a name. “I been thinking about ‘Lila,’” suggests an old woman who takes pity on the pair. “I had a sister Lila. Give her a pretty name, maybe she could turn out pretty.”
Readers familiar with Robinson’s work have met Lila before. In both Gilead, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, and its quasi-sequel Home, Lila is a maternal and wifely presence, the Reverend John Ames’s beloved, late-in-life sweetheart and mother of his beloved, late-in-life son. Neither book went into much detail about Lila’s life before she turned up like an apparition in Gilead (the tiny town in Iowa where all three novels take place) and proceeded to marry one of its most upstanding native sons. There was the vague intimation that Lila had a past, but she seemed to have transcended whatever badness it presumably had involved; a reader who thought about it at all might have imagined a stint as a barmaid, an itinerant childhood that led to spotty church attendance, or something of the sort.
In Gilead and Home, Lila fits right in among Gilead’s pious Midwestern citizens, tending flowers, keeping house, caring for her beloved old husband and raising their small boy. So the Lila of Lila comes as a complete shock. She seems almost to belong to another species, and the novel seems to come from a different set of inspirations. Gilead and Home unfold firmly in the mid-20th century, and their plots are predictably realistic; Lila reads like a 19th-century potboiler in which a neglected orphan suffers one traumatic hardship after another until she marries a kind benefactor and her fortune is miraculously reversed. In Gilead and Home, Lila strikes the reader as a soul at peace. In Lila, we see right through to her violent, half-wild imagination, her aching loneliness, and the disordered longings of her raw and battered heart.
And yet both incarnations of Lila are real and true. This new book describes Lila’s journey toward grace and baptism as a massive struggle, not a simple march toward a better life. The narrative may be familiar—a lost soul finds redemption—but Lila’s spiritual journey is anything but straightforward. She does not sink easily into comfort. Her conversion is beset by ambivalence, and she second-guesses her feelings for her husband (with whom she is genuinely smitten) even after they are wed. The convert’s path is never smooth; Lila will suffer real anguish, and be sorely tested, on the road to grace. Her struggles are mostly invisible to others; she is a reticent, fiercely private woman. She confides in her husband from time to time, but only the reader gains access to her story in full.
Lila, who has come to Gilead by chance and is sleeping in an abandoned shack outside town, walks into the Reverend Ames’s church one Sunday to get out of the rain. “And there was that old man, speaking above the sound of the rain against the windows. He looked at her, and looked away again. ‘Blessed be the name of the Lord.’” Passion for the old man and a fervid longing for salvation strike her all at once, and she begins to behave like a woman possessed. She steals a Bible, talks to the Reverend in her head, decides to ask him to baptize her: “She thought there might be something about that water on her forehead that would cool her mind.” Of course, she burns for more than baptism, and Robinson plays the scene for all it’s worth: In a single exhausting, exhilarating afternoon, Lila is both washed of her sins and engaged. “You ought to marry me,” she tells the Reverend, and then she tries to flee, “the flush of shame and anger so hot in her this time that surely she could not go on living.” He catches up to her. “Yes,” he says. “You’re right. I will.”
What follows is thrilling to read, and even more extraordinary when we recall that the same dialogue appears verbatim in Gilead. In that novel, told from the Reverend’s perspective, Lila seemed preternaturally calm; here, we see she’s half-crazed. “I want you to marry me!” she cries, after the baptism, after she declares they can’t marry, after she decides to leave town and decides to stay and decides she’ll never go to church again. “I wish I didn’t. It’s just a misery for me.” A moment later she is in his arms.
They do marry, and soon Lila is pregnant. But as the birth of the child draws near, Lila wrestles with her newfound faith, and her preoccupations turn from the earthly to the sublime. A particular passage in Ezekiel—in which a cast-out infant “welters” in blood—haunts her especially. “It’s figurative, of course,” the Reverend tells her. “Ezekiel is full of poetry. Even more than the rest of the Bible. Poetry and parables and visions.” But for Lila, the story is literally real. A storm in the book of Job reminds her of a tornado she once weathered in a ditch. The phrase “a desolation and a reproach…in the sight of all that pass by” recalls her past with Doll, when they were destitute and ashamed and shunned by passers-by: “In those days it seemed to Lila that they were nothing at all, the two of them, but here they were, right here in the Bible.” It shocks and comforts Lila to find bits of her own experience written inside a holy book. It gives her unhappy past meaning, and weight, in the world.
When Lila is heavily pregnant, the Reverend reads her a sermon he has written during the night. He begins by attempting to clarify a problem that has recently struck Lila as especially urgent: Is there a purpose to human suffering? Is suffering a necessary prerequisite for grace? The Reverend thinks so:
This is not to say that joy is a compensation for loss, but that each of them, joy and loss, exists in its own right and must be recognized for what it is. Sorrow is very real, and loss feels very final to us. Life on earth is difficult and grave, and marvelous. Our experience is fragmentary. Its parts don’t add up. They don’t even belong in the same calculation…So joy can be joy and sorrow can be sorrow, with neither of them casting either light or shadow on the other.
“Well,” Lila says when he has finished. “Near as I can tell, you were wanting to reconcile things by saying they can’t be reconciled.” The Reverend is pleased—that is exactly what he means. The reader breathes a sigh of relief. Perhaps the matter is solved. After so much trouble and pain, doesn’t Lila deserve a happy ending?
Robinson grants her heroine something much rarer, and far more sublime. Near the end of the book, after Lila’s son is safely born, after she has begun to live “that other life…almost the one she used to imagine for herself,” Lila turns to her husband with a parable of her own. “I guess there’s something the matter with me, old man,” she tells him at the breakfast table. “I can’t love you as much as I love you. I can’t feel as happy as I am.” The old man nods, and, in a remarkable reversal of their usual roles, confides in and confesses to her. “I’ll be leaving you on your own,” he says, sadly. “We’ve both always known that. I can’t tell you how deeply I regret it.”
Lila thinks it over, the loss of him to old age that is certain to arrive, and comes to her own conclusions about the end of this life and the beginning of the next. Her thoughts are stunning and simple, and they leave the reader slack-jawed with amazement and awe. By the final page, misery and joy are beautifully reconciled. It is impossible to love as much as we do, to be as happy as we are. The unfathomable is always clear but forever unfathomable. The mysteries of life reveal themselves but retain their essential mystery, and this book can’t possibly be as magnificent as it is.