sara atwood

Marilynne Robinson’s first novel, Housekeeping, was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 1982. In 2005, she was awarded the Pulitzer for her second novel, Gilead. In this seminar we will read both novels; a subsequent seminar will focus on Robinson’s third and fourth novels, which take up and expand upon the story told in Gilead. All novels are concerned with questions of family, home, memory, and the often fraught nature of human relationships. In Housekeeping, two sisters struggle towards maturity amidst tragic and complicated family circumstances. Set in a hauntingly atmospheric Idaho town, Robinson’s lyrical story blends the mundane and the mythical and confronts us with both the beauty and the difficulty of love. Gilead takes the form of journal entries, written by…

In this seminar we will read Robinson’s third, fourth, and fifth novels, Home, Lila, and Jack. These novels complete the quartet that begins with Gilead. Home takes up the story of one of that novel’s characters, Jack Boughton. Nemesis of Gilead’s narrator John Ames and son of Ames’s best friend, Rev. Robert Boughton, Jack has returned to his childhood home unexpectedly after a twenty-year absence. Now he, his aging father, and his recently-divorced younger sister Glory must navigate a difficult and often painful reunion, haunted by the mistakes and misunderstandings of the past. Lila tells the story of John Ames’s late-life marriage from the perspective of his young wife, whose quiet gentleness reveals little of her wayward, often lonely history. Lila’s story, and her love…