Reading Writer – the road less traveled

Reading tastes are terribly subjective and what one person considers a work of art, someone else might roll their eyes at or find incredibly boring. I remember last year my book group read Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and our opinions were extremely divided. Myself and another member loved the book while everyone else thought it was nice but not exciting enough to hold their interest. It’s true that Gilead is a quiet, slow-moving novel. There aren’t loud epiphanies or contentious conversations. No shouting. Most of the scenes are peaceful and contemplative. I still happen to think it’s one of the most conflict-oriented books I’ve ever read. And I think this comes from how Robinson decided to go about telling her basic story.

Gilead is an epistolary novel, composed of a collection of letters written by a man named John Ames to his son. We learn right away that Ames is an older gentleman, suffering from a heart condition and that he’s come to marriage and fatherhood late in life. His son is seven while Ames is in his seventies. The tone of the letters he writes is melancholy, detailed, tender and doting; they also have a purpose. Ames would like to present his son with a testament of his heritage and an account of his life for the child who will miss out on getting to know him in the usual way.

An epistolary novel is a hard thing to pull off with a modern reader. We have so little patience for its apparent scaffolding and the intrusion of the letter writer’s voice. We’d like to simply submerge ourselves beneath the actual story, get lost in the conversations and actions and just forget about who’s telling it. Gilead doesn’t allow that. When Ames hems or haws, we are also forced to retreat from the story he’s telling and pay attention to him, ask ourselves why he’s equivocating and do we care.

I think Robinson does make us care. The tension of the book doesn’t only exist in the tension of the stories Ames is passing along to his son, it exists to an even greeter degree in Ames’ own voice and words – what he chooses to say, what he chooses to leave unsaid, how often he repeats himself or a particular memory, the diversions he creates to avoid the details of a certain anecdote. In a way, the epistolary construction functions as a meaningful distraction. Ames isn’t just leaving a legacy for his son, he’s also preparing himself to die.

That level of the story wouldn’t exist if Robinson had been advised by her editor to re-write the novel in a traditional format. She definitely could have gotten rid of the letters and the story of Ames’s family and life would have been immensely compelling – there’s no doubt of that in my mind. But it would be missing a fundamental dimension. A fundamental tension. A lesser writer could not have pulled it off, however. Robinson had to be in control of those two textual layers otherwise the reader would lose the thread of each.

Do I think she was in control of those two threads from the very beginning? Maybe she had an idea, maybe not – my guess is that Ames’s internal conflict developed as she guided him in telling the main story. The more he told, the more she got to know him and the more she discovered what it was he really wanted to say. I believe this is how most manuscripts take shape. But once those two layers were established and evident, she picked and prodded and refined and smoothed until everything was just right.