Gilead: a choose your own parable book?
Liz,
I think I realized why I’m having a hard time reading this book cover to cover.
I read in an interview with Ma-Ro once that she just doesn’t read books from front to back. She simply likes to open the book to its middle and see what it has to offer her. I feel like Gilead is sort of Ma-Ro’s gift to that particular kind of reader. The reader who likes to approach books as if each one could potentially be a Bible, a book that you come back to and pick up a passage, hold it up to the sun, and admire its contours and see-through parts. It helps that most of the novel is about the Good Book, so the content echoes the form. I don’t mean to call this novel slight in any way, or that it is just a book of quotables. For instance, I love it when Ames returns to his relationships with his brother Edward; these reflections set up Ames as the white sheep of the family and then complicates what being a white sheep actually means. His relationship to Boughton is shaping up to be the entire point of the novel. So, there are “storylines” per se. But do these matter to Ma-Ro? I think the form of the book says no.
As an experiment, I just flipped to near the end of the novel and read pages 207-209. Ames is still talking about his wife, this time about her baptism. Not only is the subject familiar, Ma-Ro gets a very tricky thing right: it looks like some conflict has arisen within the church over religious doctrine, but this conflict is no less present here than in the beginning. For someone who just flipped to this point after just a hundred-so pages, it still feels completely within the frame of the letter. All conflicts not being resolved in the writing of this letter seem to have already been resolved within the stories contained within. The subject of the conflict, I’m sure, is also partly Ma-Ro winking at the neverending attention given to religiosity over spirituality. As if to tease me with her grasp of the novel’s circularity, Ma-Ro even ends the passage with a very familiar line: “You ought to marry me.”
I’m going to catch up this week in time for our big finale. However I get to the end, I’m sure it will be bodacious, in all 19th, 20th, and 21st century senses of the world. I want to hear more about your grandparents in Iowa and what kind of old stories this book has dug up for you. How nice to you have to be to be Iowa-nice?
What is that you are admiring there, Marilynne? A fancy literary prize to be sure. But with such bold reflection!
