Hope and Glory

Home, by Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson’s magnificent previous novel, Gilead, was structured as a letter by the elderly, ailing Reverend John Ames to his young son. A persistent theme was the fear that Jack Boughton, the black sheep son of his dearest friend, would exercise a malign influence on his wife and boy after his death. Home is a counterpart rather than a sequel: read independently, it would still be astounding.

Narrated in the third person, the novel concerns the home of the widowed Reverend John Boughton, a former Presbyterian minister in Gilead, Iowa. Boughton is looked after by the youngest of his eight children, Glory, in a house that ‘embodied for him the general blessedness of his life, which was manifest, really indisputable’, but for her is also ‘abandoned’ and ‘heart- broken’. She was a teacher until her fiancé of several years ran off after revealing that he was already married.