Gilead and Pearl

Monday night I made another one of my periodic trips out to the 92nd Street Y, this time to see Marilynne Robinson read from Gilead. She was introduced by Meghan O’Rourke, who talked briefly about the experience of working on the NYT profile of Robinson she wrote last fall, after which there was prolonged applause as the author walked across the stage to the podium, to the point where I would not have been surprised if there had been a standing ovation.

Robinson certainly would have deserved one; the passages she read from Gilead, in which the narrator describes the process of falling in love with the woman who became his second wife, were incredibly captivating, and one felt a genuine humanness to the character’s voice, both in the authenticity of his emotions and in their expression.

It was a rich and vivid peek into another person’s life—and a markedly different experience, at least to my mind, than that offered by the second reader, Mary Gordon. The audience was told quite a few times, as Gordon introduced sections from Pearl, that “I wanted to talk about” what I’ll call Issue X and Theme Y (a typical example of which was “what happened to the political faith of my cohort”). It’s not that Pearl is a bad book—it’s just that writing a novel because one wants to “talk about” something creates a fundamentally different end product than doing so because one wants, say, to tell a story, and I found both the passages Gordon read from the novel and the beginning chunks I’d read earlier that day to possess a certain detachment, to treat the characters as objects of study rather than vibrant presentations, a feeling that was intensified by Gordon’s use of a first-person narrator of near-omniscience.

And I realized by the end of the evening that, as an individual reader, and at the broadest levels, I’m simply drawn more intently to novels in which—again speaking broadly, and from my own reaction of the portion of Pearl I’ve read so far, which is admittedly not the entire book, so I apologize for whatever disservice I may be doing both author and book—issues, if they exist at all, appear to emerge organically out of characters’ lives, rather than those in which characters’ lives illustrate issues.

16 March 2005 | uncategorized |