Reading Note:
Lila
30 October 2014
Before there was Lila, there was Colm Tóibín’s review, in the London Review of Books. I hadn’t got a copy of the novel yet, much less read it, so I ought to have set the review aside, because I prefer to read serious books fresh. I’m talking about books that I’m avid to read because I admire and follow their authors. There are reviewers whom I admire and follow, too, but I don’t want their commentary rattling around in my head while I’m discovering a new book.
I wasn’t consumed by curiosity to see what Tóibín would say about Marilynne Robinson’s novel. I had a fairly good idea, and it turned out that I was right, although he did not in fact say a lot about Lila itself. I read the review because I was hungry for Colm Tóibín. For reasons that other recent entries at the site might suggest, I’d have read anything with his byline. I came away from the review slightly bemused. It was hard to tell just what Tóibín made of Lila. He didn’t say anything really negative about it, but he didn’t rave. I realized that Tóibín must have written it with an upcoming date in mind: at about the same time American readers got hold of the LRB, he and Robinson would have had a public conversation at the 92nd Street Y. (Yes, I ought to have gone; I wanted to go. But, what with everything, I just couldn’t. Going out in the evening is still beyond me.) Tóibín and Robinson make a beautiful pair, at least in theory. He writes about the destructive oppression of the institutional church; she writes about the emptiness of life without churches. Perhaps Tóibín was keeping his options open.
After I’d read Lila, I reread Tóibín’s piece. I now saw his uncertainty in three dimensions. To pile on the metaphors, it — this uncertainty — was now, in light of the novel, enormously illuminating. The book and the review sat there in my mind, like masterpieces in a cathedral, shining upon one another, generating a blinding brilliance.
***
Structurally, it’s a clever review. Tóibín begins with a discussion of Larkin and Eliot, and their distinct thoughts about religion in modern life. Then he shifts into his own home territory. This means, first, Hemingway, specifically into Hemingway’s brief flirtation with Catholicism, and, second, Henry James, specifically the moment of transfigured humiliation at the end of The Aspern Papers. The purpose of all this is to showcase vibrant uses of religious language in secular literature. Wrapping up his introit, Tóibín writes of James,
It’s interesting that he used not only the word “soul” but also “absolution” and “angelic.” If he had wanted to use secular terms, he would have done so. Instead, he wanted to invoke something deeper and more urgently mysterious, beyond human explanation, extreme — and the lexicon he saw fit to raid was a religious one.
Only now does Tóibín swing round to Robinson. There is a lengthy discussion of Housekeeping, Robinson’s startling first novel — I remember being very startled, almost scared, too upset, in the literal sense, to want to re-read the book (I also remember recommending it right and left). There is something telling about Tóibín’s leisurely pace, although I didn’t see it at first. He is addressing issues raised by Lila, and examining them exhaustively enough so that when he finally gets round to the book under review, we’ll have all had more than our fill of Robinson and her faith. Gilead and Home, the novels substantially related to Lila, are also treated at length. I count roughly fourteen columns in the LRB review. Of these, only one and a half are devoted to Lila. Lila raises issues, as I say, but Tóibín declines to draw conclusions.
Let me bold and reckless: what this means, what this brevity, this lack of things on a great novelist’s part to say about a new book strongly suggest, is that it is much too soon to appraise a book of Lila‘s magnificence. What might have seemed to be a pendant, tacked onto two other now-beloved stories but telling a very different, and rather less agreeable (certainly less comforting) tale, turns out to be the explanation of the whole, the moment, I must say, of transfiguration. Lila doesn’t follow Gilead and Home so much as it consecrates them. And the experience is not merely aesthetic. It is as fully religious as the contemplation of a text by Augustine or Kierkegaard. And yet it remains absolutely and simply a novel.
The parallels to Scripture, beginning with the humility of Christ’s birth in the stable and coursing through all the Bible stories that seem to come to a point in the figure of Mary Maudlin, tumble down like the beams of a collapsing structure. The structure was nothing less than my understanding of the possibilities of fiction before I read Lila. Or perhaps it was my understanding of the Gospels that gave way. The structure was not weak or unsound, but it was incomplete. It had to come down so that something more comprehensive could take its place. Construction will not be undertaken anytime soon, however. I am still nursing the bruises of all those falling beams.
Extensively bandaged though I might be, I want to focus on one aspect of Lila that Tóibín doesn’t mention. (I haven’t read anyone else on the book.) Lila works out on two time planes. In the foreground, Lila approaches the town of Gilead and comes to be known and loved by its Congregationalist minister, Reverend John Ames. (We know from Gilead that they will marry and produce a son.) In the background, Lila remembers her life before Gilead, a barely civilized childhood roaming the countryside in search of migrant work followed by a rootless subsistence in towns. As a young child, she is snatched from heedless relations by a wandering woman who calls herself Doll, although she is anything but pretty. Doll nurtures Lila with an intensity that is passionate and loving but not quite parental; Doll isn’t taking the place of a mother, but stepping in after the possibility of having a mother has been lost to Lila forever. It is after Doll’s death that Lila takes to town life, but she continues to keep the distance from other people on which Doll protectively insisted. Lila’s mistrust of other people is so absolute that the colorful word “feral” doesn’t begin to describe it.
From the beginning, Lila resists Ames’s outreach of loving kindness. She accepts small creature comforts from him, but always on the inner understanding that she’ll be leaving Gilead soon. She holds on to her plan of escape as though it were her only source of hope. This continues right to the end of the book, where she will only allow that her son will be raised as a proper Christian, and that she will stay with Ames for as long as he shall live. But she never surrenders entirely. She never fully accepts the balm that has been offered.
In this resistance, Lila dramatizes — vividly, hugely, with all the unforgettable power of a CinemaScope goddess — the soul’s resistance to grace. There is no allegory, and yet there is nothing but allegory. The stubbornness of humiliated, all-too-mortal pride to acceptance and love is arguably the deepest mystery of Christianity, the most terrible thing that Jesus discovered about people. At the same time, it is Christianity’s common yard; it is where every congregation stands and sings and repents — a place wholly taken for granted. It is this familiarity that Marilynne Robinson has exploded and enlightened. The shock of reading Lila will take long to subside, and it doesn’t matter whether you are a “believer” or not. (Only a simpleton would argue that a lack of faith in religious dogma renders Scripture insignificant.) The ash from the explosion, which is probably more like snow, or even dew, will settle on everything in your life. Eventually, Lila will become familiar, too. Everything always does. But the world will not be the same.