Lila: A Novel

This is an incredible book! Superbly written with characters that are so well developed you feel as you know them. Lila had a very tough life. Roaming with a band of people, one of which is a disfigured woman who took Lila from the steps of a rooming house. Together, they travel looking for food,

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for shelter and to make the best of what life hasn't given them.

When the dust bowl occurs and work is hard to find for the group, the woman who loved her had to abandon her on the steps of a church.

It is here that she meets the much older pastor who is drawn to her, at first to help her, and then, to love her.

Most of the book centers on their relationship both before and after they are married. Though Lila no longer has the necessity of searching for love, for shelter, for food, she is consumed with the hard life she once had. Struggling to accept unconditional love and non judgement, often Lila is tempted to run.

This is one of the top reads for 2015. Words are difficult to describe the beauty of the writing.

Five Stars!

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In the 1920s, a sickly young girl, about four years old or so, is abandoned by her family at a house for migrant workers in the rural Midwest. She surely would have died until she is taken away one night by Doll, an itinerant woman with a shady past of her own. Doll becomes a surrogate mother to

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the girl—who, lacking another name, is called Lila Dahl—and the two spend the next several years wandering the countryside, working when they can and living off the land otherwise. Three decades later, after Doll is no longer around, Lila finds herself in the small Iowa town of Gilead. There, she meets and marries (and eventually falls in love with) John Ames, an elderly preacher who has been a widower for many years. Lila and “the old man” share a touching, if brief, relationship, even having a baby boy along with countless theological discussions.

In Lila, Marilynne Robinson concludes her sparkling Gilead Trilogy (which also includes the novels Gilead and Home) by focusing on the backstory of the minister’s young wife, who was often seen in the wings of those earlier dramas. At one level, reading this book was like visiting dear old friends you have not seen for a while and getting to know them all a little better. However, in this installment, Robinson also transports the reader well beyond the comfortable boundaries of Gilead into a wider, sadder, and more unseemly world that is crucial to understanding how Lila’s mindset develops and why she appears to be so resistant to trusting people or even wanting to be rescued from the hard and lonely life she has had to lead. Although not all of this part of the story was convincing (e.g., Lila’s time “in service” while living in St. Louis), it nevertheless contributes to the creation of a memorable character study.

As always, the author’s prose borders on being brilliant: it is subtle, confident, insightful, and deeply moving. I have to confess to being a huge fan of Robinson’s work and I have always taken great pleasure in settling into the slower reading tempo that it takes to truly savor her fiction. That said, though, I enjoyed this last book in the series a bit less than I did the two that preceded it, perhaps because of the somewhat disjointed narrative structure that bounced between Lila’s past and her present. That is a very small quibble, however, as this is a novel that I can definitely recommend without hesitation.

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Canadian Reviewer Robert Adams believes that the reader has two duties. Number 1 is to “discern as clearly as possible the author’s vision”. Secondly, to try and match the author’s vision to their own.

I was excited to receive Marilynne Robinson’s Lila to review because it is published by

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Virago, one of my favourite publishers. Robinson is also the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, has won the Orange Prize and been nominated twice for the International Man Booker Prize. Whilst I haven’t read her earlier books, I understand that Lila features the same setting and characters as Gilead and Home.

If you are looking for a fast-paced thriller or steamy romance, this is not the book for you. Lila is very much a book of the interior and designed to make you think…a lot.

The character of Lila is a homeless itinerant who somehow makes her way into the town of Gilead, a small town in Iowa. An unlikely romance blossoms between Lila and the local elderly and widowed minister. What does she see in him? And what on earth can he see in her?

This is a deeply contemplative, spiritual book. It is about what we believe and how we arrive at those beliefs. Yes, it does refer to the Bible a bit, but it’s not just about religion. I think Robinson is exploring really important ideas here about how we arrive at judgements about each other and our place in the world.

Robinson is renowned for dealing with the big questions of life: why we are put on this earth; why some struggle and some have it so easy; the miracle of life; the mystery of death; the challenge of language to articulate our personal experience. It’s all here. But you'll have to work at it. As Malcolm Fraser famously once quoted, “Life wasn’t meant to be easy.”

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2014, MacMillian Audio, Read by Maggie Hoffman

Set in the small Iowa town, and revisiting the familiar characters of Gilead and Home before it, Lila is a moving conclusion to Robinson’s trilogy.

Abandoned as a toddler, Lila is rescued by Doll, a wily drifter – and the two share a hardscrabble

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existence made bearable by mutual affection. Illiterate and on the run, they life hand-to-mouth, with nothing to their names but a rough blade for protection. When Lila arrives in Gilead, she steps into the town’s small church, seeking shelter from the weather. A romance is ignited between her and Reverend John Ames, which will completely reshape both of their lives. As the two begin a new existence, Lila struggles to reconcile the hardships of her past life with the gentle Christian life she now shares with her husband.

I think both the strength, and perhaps the weakness, of Lila, is the absolute oddity of the marriage between Lila and Ames. Robinson manages the mystery of their existence expertly, but I found the pairing so odd that it almost defied believability.
While I personally did not care for Gilead, certainly Jack Boughton and Lila Ames are characters I won’t soon forget. Both Lila and the Gilead trilogy is recommended.

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Marilynne Robinson's first novel, Housekeeping, which appeared in 1980, is my favorite of her now four published novels. I read the next two, Gilead and Home, shortly after they were published and enjoyed them as well. They are stories of an elderly preacher, the Reverend John Ames, pastor of a

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Congregationalist church in a small Iowa prairie town, father of a young boy and husband to a surprisingly young wife. In that first novel set in the hamlet of Gilead, as well as the second (Home), Lila Ames was an elusive figure, a mystery always in the background: Who was she and how did she come to marry the Reverend Ames? In Lila, Robinson’s new novel, her story is told through an unusual love story, one shaped in no small amount by the questions Robinson has asked for her entire career: What is the meaning of suffering? Do any of us have hope of redemption?

The novel traces the life of the indigent Lila from about the age of five in 1920 through her marriage to the elderly Reverend Ames and the birth of their son 30 years later. As she prepares for the child’s arrival, her thoughts tell us of her distant past as an itinerant farm worker during the great dust storms of the Depression and her subsequent years in a St. Louis brothel, but returning always to the woman, called Doll, who raised her. The opening of the novel is brutal in its realistic depiction through Lila’s memory of herself as a girl shivering outside a backwoods cabin at night. Will it do her more harm or good if she howls to be let back in? “She couldn’t holler anymore and they didn’t hear her anyway, or they might and that would make things worse. Somebody had shouted, Shut that thing up or I’ll do it!” Treated worse than a stray dog, the girl doesn’t know who her family is, or even her own name. The same night she is rescued and carried off by Doll, a poor drifter who becomes like a mother to the girl, and names her Lila.

Lila is a novel of no small questions. “I just been wondering lately why things happen the way they do,” Lila observes to Reverend Ames, when, as a newcomer to Gilead she stops by the widower’s house unannounced, to his alternating delight and embarrassment. He doesn’t handle her question except to offer the tautological reply that life is a “very deep mystery, and that finally the grace of God is all that can resolve it. And the grace of God is also a very deep mystery.” These awkward, searching conversations between them continue, composing a unique courtship during which they discuss her somewhat-accidental theological questions and she spontaneously suggests they get married. She is so uncomfortable with herself, consumed with a loneliness she both reveres and regrets, that she can barely stand to look other people in the eye. But in the Reverend she sees a similar aloneness and a kindness she cannot quite comprehend. The book is punctuated by their earnest dialogues, in which they fumble toward better understanding themselves, each other, and how they feel about hoary doctrinal concepts like salvation and damnation. Quotes from the Bible, primarily the prophet Ezekiel, are interspersed with references to Calvin--heady stuff.

The book is dialectical in this way, these halting conversations akin to hinges, each one representing a moment when Lila opens just a bit in a new direction. Even when she’s alone, she carries on devising questions for the man she’ll always call “the Reverend,” like “What do you ever tell people in a sermon except that things that happen mean something?” Her candor and perseverance help move him away from the rote complacency he’s allowed to take root during decades of pastoral work.

To see what she can remember from her brief time in school, Lila buys a pencil and writing tablet and begins copying from the Bible she stole from Reverend Ames’s church. One verse from Ezekiel catches her eye:
"In the day thou wast born thy navel was not cut, neither wast thou washed in water to cleanse thee ... No eye pitied thee."
She begins to see her infant and child self as others would have seen her, taking up the tools of language and metaphor to re-imagine her own story, developing compassion for herself. From copying and thinking about Bible verses and talking with the Reverend, she finds she is thinking about “existence” in place of “why things happen the way they do.” When Lila Ames finishes her reading and copying out of Ezekiel, she moves on to Job, and finds its language not so off-putting, its themes of displacement and loss not unfamiliar. “She never expected to find so many things she already knew about written down in a book,” Robinson writes. Lila is not entirely sure what to make of the change that’s come over her, but she finds she may be willing to leave behind past loneliness and suffering, opening herself to love’s simple grace and kindness:
"She kept thinking, What happens when somebody isn’t herself anymore? I seem to be getting used to things I never even knew about just a few months ago. ... Maybe it’ll be something the old man liked about me that will be gone sometime, and I won’t even know what it was. She found herself thinking she might stay around anyway. She thought she’d always like the feel of him, she’d probably always like to creep into bed beside him. He didn’t seem to mind it."

In spite of the intensity of the story and its serious message, or perhaps because of it, I was not as impressed with this further tale of the residents of Gilead as the earlier novels. Robinson is effective in depicting the simple nature of Lila, but she does not convince me that such a simple person could maintain her personality while delving into the theological issues that she raises. On the other hand, Reverend Ames seems incapable of providing answers with his responses frustratingly brief and platitudinous. They were not convincing for this reader, but Lila seemed not to mind. There are also unusual details that do not seem to fit with the story. For example, there is a knife that is extremely important to Lila from her early difficult years, yet unlike Chekhov's gun, nothing of import comes of the knife later in the story. Robinson does write with a beautiful prose style, but the content of this book made its average length seem too long for the story that it contained.

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Easily my favorite of the Gilead Trilogy. Lila must be reckoned with.

Without a doubt, Robinson is an excellent writer. She has the ability to capture goodness, love, forgiveness, and grace like no other. But that doesn't make her books easy to read. Lila is the wife of John Ames, the old preacher in "Gilead". This book tells the story of Lila before she became Ames'

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wife. Her past is wretched; she is fearful and frightening at the same time. Her relationship with Ames would be unbelievable in the hands of any other author.

John Ames is just about one of my favorite characters in literature. He represents what Christianity is all about--love, forgiveness, and grace. He knows the depths of love and forgiveness without judgment and has the ability to never take himself too seriously in spite of being a very serious preacher. There are moments in the interaction between Ames and Lila that are pure tenderness.

My problem with the book is the stream of consciousness technique of telling Lila's story before Ames. Rambling and at times difficult to follow, it is her thoughts, but for the reader, often hard to follow. The timeline of the book is not straight chronological and wanders between the present and Lila's thoughts of the past. Of course, those thoughts explain how Lila became who she is, but sometimes just hard to follow. Still this is a book to treasure. It didn't affect me quite as much as "Gilead" but it's a still an amazing book.

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I didn't like it as much as I thought I would. Lila's story itself drew me right in - an impoverished, rootless girl who had to make up her own value system. But it seemed fully half of the book was about religion. If I'd wanted to read about religion this would be the one I'd want to spend time

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with - inclusive, supportive and joyful, not what one would think of Calvanism, more Universalism. But I didn't want to read about religion, so it did not have the intended uplifting effect.

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I certainly won't detract from my praise for Marilynne Robinson (see my review of Home), but I had a bit more trouble with this third part of the Gilead series. Once again Robinson changes the perspective, now to Lila, the young wife of the much older reverend John Ames. As an orphan she has had a

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quite poor and eventful childhood, living the life of a vagabond, ending up in a marginal gang, and even in a brothel. The atmosphere in this novel is strongly reminiscent of John Steinbeck, with even explicit references to the Depression and Dust Bowl period (i.e. the 1930s) that is so powerfully drawn in Grapes of Wrath.

During her lonely wanderings, Lila by chance ends up in Gilead, Iowa, and thus inevitably comes into contact with Reverend John Ames, who had lost his wife and child a long while ago and seemed exhausted. Ames and Lila seem like two extremes: he a thoughtful, struggling intellectual, she a rude and bruised orphan girl. Yet a moving dynamic arises between the two; the way they interact is so careful, thoughtful, and tactful that it almost physically hurts to follow. Quite unexpectedly, for both of them, they even get married. Surprising also for the reader, because we constantly see Lila deliberating whether she should move on or not. Even when she becomes pregnant by Ames those doubts remain, and the great thing is that Ames appears to be all too aware of them.

Especially in the second half of the book, Lila continues to muse about her turbulent past, about the dramatic events in it, and about the main characters of that period, especially her surrogate mother Doll. That past continues to pull at her persistently, especially because of the knife she received from Doll, with which the latter had stabbed to death a man who might have been Lila's father. The Calvinist religious-moral framework in which Robinson places her stories obviously plays an important role in all this. From that light, you can see Lila as a kind of Mary Magdalene, who is carefully guided by Ames to the right path, but who also has a moral compass that is so strong that, eventually, she can appreciate the uniqueness of what is happening between them. From Lila's point of view, there is the constant threat of damnation, a pull to evil even, that she actively struggles with. And with that Robinson brings us to territory that is pretty familiar to her.

Once again: this third Gilead part also plays at a very high level in terms of literature, and in terms of content, the sketch of Lila's gradual redemption is particularly existentially relevant. But I did have some difficulty with the structure of this novel: the accumulation of constant flashbacks and streams of consciousness make this book very difficult to read. In 'Home' you still had the sublime dialogues between the protagonists to keep the story bearable, and that is much more lacking here, especially in the second half of the book. Hence my slightly lower rating. But that does not detract from the fact that Robinson with Lila has created a character that, in terms of psychological and existential depth, can compete with the most striking of Greek or Shakespearean tragedies.

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Guys, this was SOOO good. I love books like this, that are chewy and rich and thoughtful and wise in funny and surprising ways. I have NOT read the other two books in Robinson's trilogy, but I certainly will. Lila is such an incredible character - scrappy, and strong, and wise in ways I didn't

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expect. Her relationship with Rev. Ames was so beautiful, and so absolutely true - I loved the ways they challenged each other to think and believe more. I held my breath through the last 100 pages, because I didn't want this story to end. I can't imagine this will not be on my list of favorite books of 2015.

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In Lila, Robinson takes us back to Gilead, a small town in Iowa. This time, her focus is on Lila, a wanderer who arrives in Gilead alone without many possessions. Through flashbacks, we gradually learn more about Lila, who grew up without her biological family. Instead, she was cared for by Doll, a

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woman traveled around the country with a larger group of wanderers looking for work and just barely surviving. Lila's life takes a sharp turn, however, when she meets John Ames, the focal character in Robinson's earlier book, Gilead.

I love Robinson's writing. Her word choices and her sentence construction are, at times, like poetry. It is also clear that she deeply cares for her characters. During her reading last weekend, she was asked why many of her characters are wanderers, and she said that she believes that when you take people out of their typical setting, that is when you get to their essence. Although Lila has had a hard life, Robinson never stoops to stereotypes to characterize her. Instead, we get her essence, the good and the bad, the confused and the certain, the scared and the brave. Her interactions with John Ames allow her to wrestle with difficult issues surrounding faith and religion, and here we get the benefit of Robinson's thoughtful consideration of these issues. I've loved all of Robinson's books, but this may be my favorite. It is one that I'm glad to have on my shelf so that I can revisit it.

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Marilynne Robinson's Lila is the third book, following her Pulitzer prize-winning novel Gilead and Home, set in the small town of Gilead, Iowa. In Gilead, elderly Reverend John Ames has a very young wife named Lila and young son, whom he is writing a long letter to which is the story of the

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novel.

In Lila, we get to know more of Lila, the enigmatic, quiet figure from the periphery of Gilead. The beginning of the book introduces us to the young child Lila, freezing out on a door stoop after someone got tired of her crying. A poor woman named Doll came to her rescue, and takes the severely neglected and abused Lila and runs away.

There is a heartbreaking scene as Doll takes Lila to another house, where the woman there gently cleans up the sick and exhausted Lila. It made me cry and that was just page seven.

Lila has had a hard life and one day while walking through Gilead, she finds herself exhausted and sees a little abandoned house. She stays there for weeks, living on fish and dandelion greens. She wanders into town and ends up at Reverend John Ames' church during services.

After church, she stops by John Ames' home and he invites her in. Watching their relationship blossom, the tender way he cares for Lila and the way she comes to care for him is beautiful, like watching a flower slowly blossom and bloom. Lila works on instinct, and Reverend Ames on intellect, yet they manage to find a way to each other.

The writing is gorgeous, the kind that makes want to re-read passages over again to get a full appreciation of Robinson's poetry and skill, like this one:
So when she was done at Mrs. Graham's house she took the bag of clothes and walked up to the cemetery. There was the grave of the John Ames who died as a boy, with a sister Martha on one side and a sister Margaret on the other. She had never really thought about the way the dead would gather at the edge of a town, all their names spelled out so you'd know whose they were for as long as that family lived in that place. And there was the Reverend John Ames, who would have been the preacher's father, with his wife beside him. It must be strange to know your whole life where you will be buried. To see these stones with your own name on them. Someday the old man would lie down beside his wife. And there she would be, after so many years, waiting in sunlight, all covered in roses.
Lila is a work of art, a quiet book that will pull at your heartstrings and maybe look at people in a different way. It won many awards last year, including The National Book Critics Circle Award, and made many publications Top Ten Lists. It is a book to contemplate and savor. I give it my highest recommendation.

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This just didn't work for me. Maybe I was expecting too much after having loved both Gilead and Home, but Lila really came off as a huge letdown for me. Granted, Robinson continues to craft an entirely new story from a completely different point of view without leaving the small town of Gilead or

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her handful of familiar characters, but I found myself getting rather muddled while listening to this one. I never got comfortable with Lila as a character. She always seemed ready to bolt, like some wild animal that discovers too late that they have left their comfortable and familiar countryside and strayed into the heart of a community. Maybe that is the point Robinson is trying to convey, but I just never settled into this story like I did the other two, even though I did like getting glimpses of Ames and Reverend Boughton from a different point of view.

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Sometimes when I read a book I love I'm like, "Man, how could anyone not love this book! It's so good and so vast and so fast-paced and the writing is lovely yet tight and it's just a winner all around!" I loved Lila deeply but I can absolutely understand why others wouldn't. It's slow. Not a lot

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happens. Basically, it's like every other Marilynne Robinson book I've ever read, and like ever other book of hers I've read, I loved it so much!

The language is beautiful. The characters are rich and lovely and I just . . . what do you say about Ms. Robinson? If you've read and loved the other two in this Gilead sort-of-series then you know what to expect and I can't imagine you being disappointed. If you've read and disliked / felt indifferent about them, then there's nothing here that's going to redeem her for you. If you've never read Robinson, I'd suggest giving Gilead a shot first.

Another reviewer asked, "Have you ever read a book so good it hurt?" and I think that's as good a way as any to describe my experience reading this book. I live in the same Iowa town that Robinson lives in and I sincerely hope I never run into her because I'm pretty sure I'd either start weeping or yelling at her, such is the deepness of the emotions her works get out of me.

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Marvelous! So many new ways of looking at the world that inspired me to question some of my cultural assumptions and prejudices. The people felt real, superbly drawn, so interesting and deep. Really liked the setting, the time period, the remarkable crisp clarity of the writing. A fine book!

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Can’t wait to gobble up the other Gilead books.

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This is the third, and the saddest, in the series of interconnected books that started withGilead. The book is the story of Lila, a neglected child, growing up in poverty, who, by seeming chance, becomes the wife to Reverend John Ames. I really liked this book, but cried a lot reading it. It's a

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book about redemption, and so I think there are things I would understand better if I were more religious. Lila's life before John Ames was so hard and traumatic, but with elements of grace and love. Lila is trying to figure out if it's possible to make a new life without giving up the things she values from her old life. Robinson is showing us that the suffering and blessings are mixed-up in our lives, and sometimes it's hard to pull them apart.

Again, I enjoyed reading the same story from a different perspective. Having Lila's perspective on her marriage deepens the account previously given by John Ames, and reminds us of how we each construct our own story and history.

Gilead remains my favorite of the three books, although I am glad that I read all three. But how can you top a one-eyed abolitionist grandfather who is always stealing from people?

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This very original novel appears on many of the best books of 2014 lists and it is well-deserved. It was not a comfortable book for me to read. The story of a baby stolen from her parents and raised by an old homeless migrant woman was compelling. Lila’s marriage to an old minister had me worried

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she would leave him because of her being uncomfortable in a secure setting. This is the kind of book that gives one lots to think about particularly as we readers living in comfort know little about the minds of permanently homeless people.

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A huge fan of Marilyn Robinson (author of "Gilead" and "Home") and the good friends and family of the Rev. Ames in this little Iowa hamlet. "Lila" acts as a prequel in which we learn how this mysterious, much younger woman comes to marry the good cleric. Horribly abused as a youngster, 4 year old

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Lila is rescued/stolen by the caring Doll. They take up hiding with a band of itinerant farm workers, although times are cruelly tough with the ravages of the Dust Bowl era. Through her many privations, Lila learns to be cautious around strangers. None turns out to be so strange to her reckoning than kindly John Ames. Can she learn to trust him? This is a challenging read. Sprinkled throughout are passages from Ezekial, Job and John Calvin. Harsh readings, but they bring comfort to someone who has only known harshness herself. Her God is one who can reside in those difficult areas of life.

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Review of Lila: A Novel, by Marilynne Robinson. Set during the Dust Bowl and its aftermath, this novel follows the life of Lila, a stolen child who grows up in the company of a band of vagrants who live outside and find work when they can. It reminds me of my own mother’s stories of the dust

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clouds that reached as far as her home town in Illinois, and of the travelers who sometimes came to my grandmother’s door and were given a meal. Lila is a bit of a wild child, barely lettered, with little concept of abstract thought, the Bible, or the rooted ways of small towns in the Midwest. What she knows is the smell of hay, the sound of rivers, the dampness of rain, and the cycles of the seasons. Fear, shame and suspicion are rooted in her, along with a fierce loyalty to her small band of vagrants, especially her protector Doll. Comforts are rare and treasured: a loaned shawl, a rag doll, a free meal at a revival camp. Hers has been a hardscrabble life. She is unprepared, then, for her encounter with a widowed preacher in Gilead, his comfortable home, and all the restrictions of life in a town. Lila teeters between the safety of this new life and the lure of the wild, calling her back to her wandering ways. Ever on edge, the reader is never quite sure which path Lila will take. Reading the Bible and talking with the minister raises burning questions in her about heaven and hell, good and evil, the saved and the damned. Surely her band of vagrants, outside the boundaries of acceptable society and the law, would be among the damned, Doll included?…Yet they are the only society she has known, the only comfort and belonging. This is a question she ponders almost obsessively--and forces on both the reader and the minister. The confrontation between Lila and the minister is not just about theology, but about apprehending the world through words and concepts versus knowing it through primal existence. Lila thinks: “That old man had no idea. Let us pray, and they all did pray…There was no need for any of it. The days came and went on their own, without any praying about it.” Lila’s knowledge of life takes a different form: “She thought she could unravel the sounds the river made…the soft rush of the eddy. Now and then there were noises, some small thing happened and disappeared, no one would ever know what it was.” This unsocialized, unlettered knowledge is profound, searing, and lonely. Yet it is this knowledge--and not the other--that makes this novel shake and sing.

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This was my first Marilynne Robinson novel. I was aware of her previous books but never felt drawn to them. Since this had been a best seller for so long, I decided to give it a try. At first I was afraid I would not get into it. It felt very slow and repetitive. However, as I read, I realized how

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I was being drawn in to this beautifully written prose. It tends to meander...through time, through characters, through biblical passages, through thoughts but the way they all begin to intersect and compliment each other is like a web that holds you. I felt myself fill up as I read. I am so glad that I stuck with it. Beautiful and very life affirming! A nice way to begin a new year!

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