Give Yourself a Christmas Gift...

...and read Gilead, the new novel by Marilynne Robinson.

 

 

This is the best book I have read in a  long time, and I read a lot of books.

Spare.  Haunting.  Bittersweet. 

John Ames, the aging pastor of a small church in Gilead, Iowa, writes to his little son, the product of his recent marriage to a young woman.  He wants to leave something of himself, something of who he is, what his cares and concerns have been, for the little boy who will soon be fatherless.  His story roams across three generations of Ames men, merging the personal with the history of the slave-free state debate in Kansas, and juxtasposing the interior tranquility of a pastor who has "loved this life" with the inner turmoil and jealousy that trouble him at the same time.

Grace abounds in this book.  Even if you have no idea what grace means, and even if you couldn't name it if it leapt upon you or surrounded you, you will know when you finish that you have been immersed in it. 

I've had a lot of work to do since Thanksgiving, and I managed to resist purhcasing this book for maybe a week after it appeared on the cover of The New York Times Book Review.  I finished it at 2:00 a.m. a few mornings later.  And I read it from beginning to end.  Well, okay, I did read ahead a little, just once, after I realized that there was a mysterious past that needed to be addressed.  But then I went back and kept reading, every single word.  Now that is something I seldom do.  And I plan to start over again tonight.

There is, by the way, no Christmas episode in the novel. But the whole novel is about Christmas, in one way or another.