- GILEAD
- by Marilynne Robinson
- rated by pbs readers as # 84
- 256 pages
This is an interesting phenomenon to me. I started this book – a letter from a grandfather to his grandsons, to be read years after his death. And I liked it immediately.
60 pages in out of 247, I can’t tell you how long this might take me. I’ll bet that it will take me significantly longer than many of the books so far that exceeded 500 pages. More than any other lesson this blog has taught me, I have learned, solidly, that the amount of pages in a book has almost no effect on the length of the time reading it.
Gilead is written beautifully. If I had a beef, it would be that he is talking about two generations that came before him and two that came after him, and often in a jumbled collection of memories. Color me lost! It is a bit hard to keep track of.
But the phenomenon that I referred to earlier is that this style of writing – and by that I mean any style of writing – that is so rich, either in verbiage or imagery that every phrase has import requires of the reader a slowness in reading that I don’t think many of us still have.
I’ll be interested in observing this when I reread Beloved for this blog. Completely different styles, but again so dense that you have to slow down completely to take it in. The weird result is that you are basically never slow enough and therefore you have a guilty feeling of light skimming throughout. And it doesn’t make sense to skim in a book that isn’t leading you to greener pastures. These are the greener pastures!
I like the images and the stories and, like The Book Thief, it is great to read an author who is on a psychic roll with their writing – almost untouchable in their singular vision of how it should be.
Though I’ll finish this, you can bet that I will be grabbing reads along the way with less richness and a plot!
LATER, NOT QUITE HALFWAY THERE…
Okay. The first hundred pages had me mourning for the storytelling richness and how I couldn’t slow down enough for it.
But then again…
I am, after all, a postmenopausal woman without enough patience to listen to a long joke. In all fairness to the previous statement, I have a lot of experience with comedy and I know for a fact that if a joke takes too long, it almost never has a payoff that is worth all of that. So one way to see me is someone wanting to avoid that feeling of disappointment. Another way is a cranky bitch. But I digress…
So, can I point out the elephant in the middle of my mental living room when I’m reading this? I’m impatient so I won’t bother waiting for your answer.
THERE. IS. NO. PLOT.
I mean, come on! Assorted memories from the two generations before him and to his grandson, two generations below… It’s beautifully written but without a plot, it’s like looking at someone else’s relatives’ photo album. Do I care enough? Sorry. Don’t.
Now I’m trying to contrast it with other densely written books. Book Thief comes to mind, with its very dense and thick writing. But it goes somewhere! From Point A to Point Z. You can follow along. Also, it has characters you ache for, you like them so much.
This may be building up to something in the end, but quite frankly, if it doesn’t get there soon or reveal something more that makes me care about anyone in here, then the joke just went on too long.
DONE.
Color me relieved. I am numb at the thought of trying to put this book into context, when I myself haven’t found the context!
When I make a list at night for the next day, I put the books I’m reading on it from time to time. More than a handful of times, I would look at the word Gilead on the page and I had either misspelled it or put a whole other word that started with G and was about as long. This isn’t a huge thing, but it does seem to underscore my lack of connection to this book.
I appreciated it throughout. I know it is good writing And despite my lack of connection, I didn’t ever disrespect it.
But I did often feel like a girl who either hasn’t drunk enough or has no sense of what she’s drinking, claiming that she’ll have either a gorgeous chardonnay or a glass of Gallo Chablis (remember Gallo Chablis in college, Laurie?) – it’s all the same to her. Sort of an often repeated feeling of “I’m not getting the depth of this and the depth is there, so it is clearly my fault.”
There was eventually a plot point that made the whole thing come together a bit, but for the life of me, I couldn’t understand why it had taken 200 pages to get there.
Gilead has my respect but not my love. Ah well. Shit happens. And I’m truly excited to get a far more readable book to follow it.
Oh and one last thing. This book wound up as some people’s greatest reads? I’d like to meet those people. Or maybe I wouldn’t. Don’t really know what we’d have in common!
PS Hope you don’t mind I sent two at once. I would like to catch up to myself at some point here, so I may do that from time to time. Thanks for reading.