That orphan he was first he always would be, no matter how they loved him. She was glad she had seen the boy brand new, red as fire, without a tear to give to the world, no ties to the world at all, just that knot on his belly. Late in the book, Lila thinks of her infant son: And we carry our indelible orphanhood with us into whatever family, community, or vocation eventually takes us in. In this book, every person is an orphan before they are a daughter or a son-or a wife, or a worker, or a preacher.
Robinson must be one of the only living writers who can exalt philosophical individualism and make it sound beautiful and compelling. It’s an image that captures Lila’s dogged but radiant individuality. Lila sitting on the steps of a house, or a house of God-perched uneasily on the edge of community, family, or faith-is an image we meet throughout the book. The girl is just there, a commonplace miracle amid squalor. Robinson sets Lila’s sheer “mystery of existence,” to use a phrase that she acquires from John Ames later in the book, against the meanness of her circumstances. It opens: “The child was just there on the stoop in the dark, hugging herself against the cold, all cried out and nearly sleeping.” Unlike Ames’ anecdote of purity and lavishness, the scene here is of dirt and privation. You can feel her exerting that same restraint to keep from using “just” in every sentence, even when she’s not writing in Ames’ voice.īut “just” does find its way into the first sentence of her new novel, Lila (2014), which gives us the backstory of Ames’ mysterious second wife. She shows us how all things exist in excess of themselves, if we pay them the proper attention. This passage epitomizes Robinson’s aesthetic.
People talk that way when they want to call attention to a thing existing in excess of itself, so to speak, a sort of purity or lavishness…. I almost wish I could have written that the sun just shone and the tree just glistened, and the water just poured out of it and the girl just laughed…. There’s a moment in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead (2005) when the old preacher John Ames nearly loses control of his storytelling voice to a torrential repetition of the word “just”: Louis, where he’s writing about twentieth-century American literary intellectuals and Christian social thought. Jonathan McGregor is a PhD candidate in English and American Literature at Washington University in St.
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