Reading Note: Old Times
It’s all I can do to keep from pulling down Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead in order to perk up my recollection of the details of Jack Boughton’s difficult life, as told, in that book, by his father’s best friend, the very disapproving Jack Ames. Instead, I’m letting Home refresh my memories. Home, we’re told, relates events “concurrently” from the point of view of Jack’s sister, Glory, a good woman who has seen more of life than her family suspects. Glory has come back to Gilead to take care of her ailing, widowed father — but that isn’t the whole story. The whole story unspools in what can only be called immense narrative piety.
She thought. Yes, a little like the old times. Graying children, ancient father. If they could have looked forward from those old times, when even a game of checkers around that table was so rambunctious it would have driven her father off to parse his Hebrew in the stricken quiet of Ames’s house — if they could now look in the door of the kitchen at the three of them there, would they believe what they saw? No matter — her father was hunched over his side of the board, mock-intent, and Jack was reclined, legs crossed at the ankles, as if it were possible to relax in a straighted-backed chair. The popcorn popped.
In the best sense in the world, Marilynne Robinson is a great respecter of persons.