|
|
 |
 |
[Click To Enlarge]
Email A Friend - Gift Reminder |
Home: A Novel
Availability:
In Stock
Price:
$25.00
$2.50*
|
| Part No: | 0374299102 |
| Manufacturer: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| MFG Part: | |
| Customer Rating: | 4.0 / 5.0 |
|
|
- ISBN13: 9780374299101
- Condition: New
- Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
productD description
Best of the Month, September 2008: "What does it mean to come home?" In one way or another, every character in Home is searching for that answer. Glory Boughton, now 38 and lovelorn, has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father. Her wayward brother Jack also finds his way back, though his is an uneasy homecoming, reverberating with the scandal that drove him away twenty years earlier. Glory and Jack unravel their stories slowly, speaking to each other more in movements than in words--a careful glance here, a chair pulled out from the table there--against a domestic backdrop so richly imagined you may be fooled into believing their house is your own. Meanwhile, their father, whose ebullient love for his children is a welcome counterpoint to Glory and Jack's conflicted emotions, experiences his own kind of reckoning as he yearns to understand his troubled son. There is a simplicity to this story that belies the complexity of its characters--they are bound together by a profound capacity for love and by an equally powerful sense of private conviction that tries the ties that bind, but never breaks them. It's a delicate sort of tension that you think would resist exposition--and in fact these characters seem to want nothing more than, as Glory says, to treat "one another's deceptions like truth"--but Marilynne Robinson's fine, tender prose imbues this family's secrets with an overwhelming grace. -- Anne Bartholomew
| This book should never have been published and, now that it has, no one should bother reading it. I loved Gilead and I think Robinson's prose is generally wonderful. Her style reminds me of a Horton Foote play, gentle, insightful relationships with quiet explorations of emotions as well as ideas. Unfortunately, though, I think the only reason this book, Home, ever saw the light of day was because of the success of Gilead.
This was one long wallow in pity, self and otherwise. Jack is the wimpiest character to make his way into serious fiction and there is zero development from start to finish unless one considers going from whiney to whinier to whiniest some form of development. Glory also has her share of self-pity but reserves most of it to pour out onto her hapless brother, Jack. Old man Boughton is just plain pitiful in a hurtful, passive-aggressive fashion. Not a very likable cast to spend one's time with over the course of a whole novel in which not a lot happens except the constant whinging. I hung in there to the end, holding out some hope for redemption of some kind or other, for some character or other, but they all went nowhere but down. Not that I need or even hope for a happy ending, just for some form of viable life to emerge. I have never been sorrier that I forced myself to read to the end. |
| Boring characters and weak plot | 2010-08-07 | 2 / 5 |
| | It's hard to feel any kinship, much less sympathy, for this family. The aging and ailing father is not just uninteresting, he's destructive - the worst kind of passive aggressive tyrant. The father uses saintliness (he's a retired Congregational minister) to keep the two (out of eight) children who are "home" in a perpetual state of anxiety. Never mind that they came home to take care of him in his last days. Never mind that he could be living out his days in a nursing home instead of in the care of two middle aged kids whose lives are going nowhere. "The Reverend" is a pastor and father, always "forgiving" but never releasing his prey, an insipid son who can't seem to find himself spiritually or socially. Neither the daughter Glory nor the son Jack has friends. Jack waits endlessly for letters from a former girlfriend (they "cohabitated") and Glory simply has no friends who ever appear, call or write. She seems to be waiting to have her first independent idea. Even though Jack is held in the grip of his father's piety, he can never seem to muster the strength to stand up and be a man. What a waste of paper and ink this book turned out to be. |
| Good as Gilead | 2010-08-02 | 5 / 5 |
| Marilynn Robinson's novel Gilead was written in the form of a letter by the aging Rev. John Ames to his seven-year-old son, Robby. Ames knows he won't be around for the boy as he grows up and he wants to get his life on paper, for the boy to read about after he has gone to the great beyond.
John Ames is the Congregationalist minister of small town Gilead, Iowa and as he writes about his life we learn about his friend Robert Boughton, the town's Presbyterian minister. Robert is the widowed father of eight children and least you don't think he was religious, his daughters are named Faith, Hope, Grace and Glory. John Boughton, called Jack, is Robert's wayward, come home again son. He was named after the Rev. John.
The story takes place in the middle Fifties, when America was a simpler place, but a place that took it's religion more seriously than it does to day, especially in the midwest. Through John's letter to his son we learn about Giliad's and, of course, Marilynn Robinson's moral universe and thought I disagree mightly with it, I was glad she welcomed me in.
This book isn't a sequal, isn't a prequel, it takes place at the same time as Gilead, but is told from Glory's third person point of view, so we see much of the same story, but get a different take on it. Glory has come home to take care of her ailing father. Jack is the prodigal son returned and Jack is the character I cared mostly for. Secretly married to a black woman at that time, a man who wants to reconcile with his father, but it's hard for the Rev. Robert because he can't come to grips with Jack's morals, among other things.
This was a good book, Gilead was too. Different for me, because as I said, this kind of reading isn't usually my cup of tea as my morals run south and to the left of Jack's, but that being said, it's a testament to Marilynn Robinson's artistry the fact that I went all the way through these stories, that they made me think a bit about my life and the universe beyond. |
| Return of the Prodigal | 2010-07-16 | 5 / 5 |
| It is 1957 and after being away two decades Jack Boughton comes home, showing up on the back porch, thin and wearing a brown suit, "tapping his hat against his pant leg as if he could not make up his mind whether to knock on the glass or turn the knob or simply to leave again." He doesn't leave.
The prodigal's return is the major focal point of Marilynn Robinson's Masterpiece GILEAD, written twenty years after her first novel HOUSEKEEPING. Fortunately it's only been four years since GILEAD. Maybe she was able to shave sixteen years off this one, because it's a retelling of the last one, but from a different person's point of view.
Still, the novel has to live by itself, in my opinion anyway, and in my opinion this one does. There's not a lot of action, in fact other than a ride in a car, there isn't any at all, but there is wonderful writing. In Gilead we saw the story from the Rev. John Ames point of view in the form of a letter he was writing to his young son Robby, to be read after his death. John doesn't view Jack's return or Jack himself in nearly the same light as his younger sister Glory. This novel is told in the third person and it's told from Glory's point of view.
It goes without saying that people are going to compare the two books. Heck, how could you not? Do you need to read this if you've read Gilead? Well, if you liked Gilead you need to. This is a beautifully told story of the return of a prodigal son. There are problems and conflicts and unlike in a lot of stories, they don't all get resolved. That's all part of the beauty of this beautiful book. |
| Just Beautiful | 2010-07-07 | 5 / 5 |
| It's been four years since I read GILEAD, but this book took me immediately back to that small town in Iowa, back to the 1950s, back to a place I really enjoyed and I'm happy to say, I enjoyed it again, just as much as I did back then.
This is the same story, told from Glory's point of view. If you remember, she was the Reverend Robert Boughton's youngest daughter. She's come home to GILEAD to take care of her ailing father. Her brother Jack has come home as well and, it seems, Glory can't help but take care of him too, to the extent that he'll let her.
Glory has a shameful secret, she's been living in sin, lying to the world, saying she's been married. Jack as some secrets as well, maybe even more shameful, considering the times. And it's their secrets and how they wrestle with them that is the heart of this story. And there is the pleasure of seeing Jack and Glory reconnect, that's a good reason alone for reading this book.
Jack, the black sheep turned prodigal, has been away for two decades. Reverend Boughton seems very happy that his son has returned, but he seems unable to understand him. Though he talks of forgiveness, he can't shake how he feels. These three share the dinner table, they're family, but they're clearly uncomfortable with each other. It's not what they want it, it's way is.
This book belongs on your shelf next to GILEAD. Now, after having finished HOME, I don't see how they can be separated. These books both complete and complement each other and it makes not one bit of difference which one you read first, just so long as you go straight to the other one as soon as you finish the one you started first. |
* Current Price/Avail/Qty displayed on website may be delayed by up to 24 hours. Items added to cart and into the checkout process will reflect current price and status of product. |
|
 |
|
)
