Lila, the wife of the protagonist in Gilead, is a quiet and mysterious
character in the book that led off Marilynn Robinson’s trilogy about
the Ames and Boughton families of Gilead, Iowa. She comes out of the
shadows in the third volume, which bears her name.
As a child Lila was snatched from a Depression-era workhouse by a
vagabond named Doll. Drifting with and devotion to Doll constitute
Lila’s youth. When Doll kills a man to protect Lila and flees from the law, Lila, by then an
adult, is left alone. After a stint in a whorehouse, she eventually
takes shelter in an abandoned shack outside Gilead.
One day, to escape the rain, she ducks into the Rev. John Ames’s church
during services. Ames feels a shock of recognition, but their next
encounters are so reserved that Lila surprises herself when she blurts
out, “You ought to marry me.”
Rev. Ames is literate, spiritual, gentle, and twice Lila’s age. She is
rough, uneducated, and distrustful of religion — and of everything
else. They have loneliness in common. He has lived alone for decades
after losing his first wife and their baby. Ames will be a father
again. The child Lila is carrying is the seven-year-old son in Gilead to whom
Ames is writing a letter.
Robinson does not tell the story linearly but shifts between past and
present. The most moving parts of Lila
are the conversations in which intimacy and love grow between Lila and
Ames. She asks questions about the meaning of existence; the modest
Rev. Ames won’t answer dogmatically but is happy to discuss. Theirs
isn’t an easy bonding; trust and stability are foreign to Lila’s
experience, and she considers whether she should leave.
Like Gilead, Lila contains a
both a story and a spiritual disquisition. Robinson, a devout Christian and
admirer of Calvin, has a rare ability to write about faith and theology
without turning off those who don’t share her beliefs. Passages in her
novels about the big questions might serve as devotional
readings.
The book in between Gilead
and Lila is Home (2008), featuring the
Boughtons.
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