Gilead’s grammar with a by-your-leave
Liz,
First things first:
Huh. I guess she did change up the do sometime between 1980 and 2010. But those eyes. Staring down my soul. The eyes just don’t change, do they? The kind of eyes very well suited for general life musings. I wanted to talk about her hair more (I remember it being super dowdy and make-funable), but suddenly it’s looking sort of regal to me. Am I crazy? (note: I have enough pictures of Marilynne to cover our read of Gilead two times over. Don’t you worry.)
Marilynne Robinson? Marilynne? Ma-Ro? Lynn-Ro? MR?
Since you asked: MR does not write short stories. When you finish this book, get excited because you’ve officially gone through 2/3rds of her entire fictional oeuvre. I remember when Gilead came out in college, a part of the PR package for the book was her writing it in an insanely short amount of time, less than six months. She (as I remember fuzzily from an interview) waits for a narrative voice to come to her in a kind of feverish daydream and then the book spills out from her. Splat. Thus the 24 year gap between Housekeeping and Gilead. Thus the ultra speedy four years between Gilead and its companion book Home. The way she frames it, Ma-Ro’s productivity of fiction has nothing to do with her career as a teacher, her two other books of non-fiction, or her personal life at all; it’s just Ma-Ro’s fickle muse, doing its thing.
Onto the book! I only have two main points for the first fifty-whatever pages. I enjoyed them a lot. They read super smooth. Smooth like the-amount-of butter-used-in-a-mid-western-pancake-breakfast-smooth.
(1) As dorky as you might think yourself, it was mighty prescient of you to bring up grammar. The opening of Gilead throws formal punctuation to the wind of MR’s great mid-western prairie:
“I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I’m old, and you said, I don’t think you’re old. And you put your hand in my hand and you said, You aren’t very old, as if that settled it.”
The first words set off by quotation marks come on the next page, as our dear Reverend Ames describes his heart condition:
The doctor used the term “angina pectoris,” which has a theological sound, like misericordia.
Right away, Ames is telling his son that their conversations are his central reality. Ames is going to quote from them word for word and then place them right into the letter, right next to his own words. Real world words, like this weird thing with the big medical title that will probably cause his death, he is going to set off in quotation marks, so that it’s a little less real for his son.
When is the last time someone deployed grammar to break your heart a little?
(2) About halfway through this week’s reading, I realized there is an awful lot of old fashioned, midwest phrasery going on. I know you have relatives from Iowa, so I hand over the task of verifying these gems to you. I didn’t have time to comb through pg. 1-30, but from 30-58, my favorites:
1. “But he’d walk off with a jar of her pickled beets without so much as a by-your-leave.” (33)
2. “You have begun palling around with a chap you found at school, a freckly little Lutheran named Tobias, a pleasant child.” (37)
3. “Still, they were bodacious men, the lot of them.” (50)
Bodacious I just had to look up in the OED:
Bodacious: Southern American slang, implied by bodaciously, 1837, either from bodyaciously (“bodily, totally, root and branch”) (as in “the pigs broke into my fence and destroyed the potato patch bodyaciously”), South Carolina, or a blend of bold and audacious.
Is it just me, or does this word feel more Bill and Ted than pigs run amuck? Something tells me Marilynne would be really sad to hear me say that.
And I appreciated the the joke on pg. 34:
“Have I offended you in some way, Reverend?” my father would ask.
And his father would say, “No, Reverend, you have not offended me in any way at all. Not at all.”
And my mother would say, “Now, don’t you two get started.”
ROFL!
A couple last points:
I also ROFL’ed a little when Ma-Ro got a little meta with Ames. On pg. 43: “It is hard to understand another time.” Read: MR demands poetic license. On pg. 46: “As I write I am aware that my memory has made much of very little.” Read: Get ready for a nearly plotless 200 pages.
Sometimes, in the middle of all the life musing, things get a little too precious for me. See pg 9 when Ames spends half a page observing a scene with his wife, his son, and their cat playing with bubbles. It ends with, “Ah, this life, this world.” C’mon Amesy. Also, “The twinkling of an eye. That is the most wonderful expression.” (53) Okay, we get it. Life is sooo beautiful.
- Aaron
