Lila

Cover image courtesy of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, copyright 2015

Marilynne Robinson's new novel, Lila (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), is a companion to her earlier novels set in the fictional plains town of Gilead, Iowa--Gilead and Home--taking place in the rural Midwest of the 1950s (all freestanding and not meant to be read in any order). The books have loosely connected story lines comprising a narrow set of characters: two families are of interest in the town of Gilead, the Ameses and the Boughtons, each having generations of Protestant preachers. While the narrator of Gilead is the Reverend John Ames, and Home delineates the history of the two families from the point of view of the Boughtons, Lila continues the Gilead story from the perspective of the title character, John's wife, a former drifter.

Exploring theological questions in her writing, Marilynne often delves into the complexities of faith, grace, and doubt. Religion is interwoven with an examination of human nature and its contradictions--fear, joy, violence--essentially Lila is a love story, a fusion between the very different characters John and Lila. John has had a placid, somewhat isolated existence with deep roots in the town of Gilead as its Congregationalist preacher while Lila, neglected as a child, was rescued (or kidnapped) from her migrant household by a homeless woman named Doll, a fierce surrogate mother with the one possession of a knife. Doll and Lila fall in with a group of itinerant workers that "walk south ahead of the weather, walk north in time for the crops." After Doll disappears, Lila separates from them, and on her way to Sioux City notices an abandoned shack at the edge of Gilead and settles there. She goes from place to place in the countryside or walks into town, asking at houses for a day's work. 

Lila wanders into John's church one Sunday, and thereafter attends often even though the services are alienating for her, being nonreligious. She steals a Bible, finding that she's puzzled and disconcerted by it. "Since she is an outsider, without the assumptions that Christians bring to the text, she reads it as she might any book," says Marilynne. "At the same time, it marks the difference between herself and the world she has entered, and this intensifies her curiosity." She's converted to the faith but her skepticism of it remains. 

Gilead is a locality, but it's more of a transition point between Lila's old nomadic life with Doll and the new one with John and the close-knit community she crosses into as a stranger. She carries the knife with her: the past is always there, connected and remembered, and she prefers its transience and wildness to what she has--stability and the ordinary. Lila raises speculations about what becomes of those who live their lives outside of the sheltering and protective structures of faith and domesticity. In that way, it circles back to Housekeeping, Marilynne's first novel.

An excerpt:

     He never asked her another question about Doll, even when he gave her back that knife. The morning after she mentioned it, it was just lying there on the breakfast table between the cream pitcher and the sugar bowl, the blade closed into the handle, looking harmless enough. She'd left it there. Seemed like he might want to know where it was, until he knew her a little better. Doll had whetted the blade till it was sharp as a razor and a little worn down, the polish gone off the edge of it. When Lila was alone, she opened it. Doll's patience and her dread were all worked into that blade. Doll thinking her thoughts, working away at her knife, making it sharp as it could be. Never you mind. Then that one night she said, "Better you take it. Wash it down good, and hide it when you get a chance. Don't you never use it unless you just have to."

     It was the only thing Doll had to give her, too good to be thrown away and much too risky to keep, but what else could she do? It had a handle made of antler, shaped just enough to feel right in her hand, smooth and stained with all the hands that had held it. Doll never was the first one to own anything, and she wasn't the last, either, if she could help it. There was always something to trade for, even if it was only a favor of some kind, and everything came with a story about the woman who got it from a fellow who stole it from somebody else, which wasn't really stealing, since she never used it, and he knew she took it from a cousin's house when he was dead, and he had brothers, so she had no right to it, but he felt bad anyway, so he was selling it cheap.

     There were things you just had to respect, and that knife was one of them. Sometimes a stranger would settle himself at the fire, sitting on his heels the way folks do when they might want to move quick, and they'd study him to see what was at his back, what he carried with him, which was nothing at all and could be anything at all, like a shifting of the wind. And sometimes he had that Heck, I wouldn't harm a fly! look that made Doane glance at Arthur, and then there would be the long, careful business of sending him on his way, meaning no offense, since he looked like the kind who might want to take offense, given the slightest chance. Snakes, knives, strangers, darkening in the sky--you felt some things with your whole body. What they might mean. It could be they were on their way to do harm elsewhere and you just saw them pass by, but how could you know? Maybe twenty people had owned that knife and only one or two had done any hurt with it. A wound can't scar a knife. A knife can't weary with the use that's been made of it. Still.

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Lila is longlisted for this year's Man Booker Prize and won the 2014 NBCC Award for Fiction. Marilynne teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop.