In one of the most beautiful passages of Homecoming, Robinson’s first novel, the narrator wonders, “hy do our thoughts turn to some gesture of a hand, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon… What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?” Home moves like this, through intimate, almost mundane gestures whose meanings only bloom the longer the book is read, until they become heartbreaking, miraculous, glittering. And if I saw anything before me as quarantine began, it was––precariously so––time. If you don’t take the time to study it and dwell within it, its meaning escapes you, like a dream. Yet, her language seems to unfold like the layers of a flower, revealing with a slow, measured grace its buried workings. Her prose is not difficult in the Gilead sequence, in fact, it is exceedingly simple, almost crystalline. This reticence wasn’t due to lack of zeal, as I love Robinson’s work, but because she is a writer who requires immense patience. Coincidentally, the day my office announced its indefinite closure because of the pandemic, I opened a book I had long tried and failed to read: Marilynne Robinson’s Home, her third novel and the second in her soon-to-be-quartet based in the fictional town of Gilead, Iowa in the 1950s.
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