Balm in Gilead

I've been on a very satisfying run of book-reading lately -- the highlights being Sam Tanenhaus's biography of Whittaker Chambers, Henry James's The Ambassadors (a bittersweet experience, since The Ambassadors was the only major James novel I had not read, and it's sort of sad to think I no longer have James to look forward to, though I expect that rereading Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove will afford great pleasures), and Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, a novel that has, for the moment, just destroyed me. I finished last night (or early this morning), and the only coherent thing I can say about it for the moment is please read it.

The narrator of Gilead, a seventy-six-year-old Iowan minister dying of heart disease, writes about his life, in the hope that his young son will read and understand his long-dead father when he reaches adulthood. Here's a passage from early in the novel:

"I'd never have believed I'd see a wife of mine doting on a child of mine. It still amazes me every time I think of it. I'm writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you've done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God's grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you."

That last line sums up how I feel about this novel. If only I had the words to tell you.