The Work
Home was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in September 2008, four years after Gilead. It won the Orange Prize for Fiction (2009) and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction (2008). The novel runs to approximately 325 pages and is the second volume in Robinson's Gilead quartet, joined by Lila (2014) and Jack (2020).
The novel covers the same time period as Gilead - the summer and early autumn of 1956 in Gilead, Iowa - but narrates events from the perspective of the Boughton household rather than through John Ames's letters. Where Gilead gives the reader the interior world of a dying man writing with deliberate calm, Home gives the reader the anxious, grieving, loving perspective of a daughter watching her father die and her prodigal brother try to return.
Biblical Engagement
The Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32) governs the novel's structure with an explicitness that approaches allegory without quite becoming it. Robinson herself described the novel as asking whether the parable is literally true: 'Does the father really run? Does he really put the ring on his finger and the robe on his back before the son has finished his speech? Is there really a fatted calf?'
Luke 15:20 - 'And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him' - is the parable's key verse and the novel's governing question. John Ames Boughton (called Jack), the prodigal, has returned to Gilead after twenty years of dissolute living - alcoholism, an abandoned illegitimate child, moral failure of every kind. His father, the elderly Calvinist minister Robert Boughton, waits for him with the parable's father's unconditional love.
The elder brother of the parable (Luke 15:25-30) is evoked in the figure of Reverend John Ames, who cannot extend grace to Jack even though he preaches it - and whose jealousy and suspicion, while largely absent from the novel's primary narrative, loom as a structural presence. Jack himself is aware of the parable's architecture: he knows he is the prodigal son, and he does not know whether the return is possible.
Genesis 27:38 - Isaac's blessing of Esau and Jacob, and Esau's cry 'Hast thou but one blessing, my father? bless me, even me also, O my father' - appears as a second biblical frame. The Boughton family is structured around the question of blessing: the father's love for all his children is unquestioned, but his special tenderness for Jack has always set the prodigal apart. The question of whether the father's blessing can reach Jack - whether the father's love can accomplish what the parable's father's love accomplishes - is the novel's central tension.
Romans 5:8 - 'But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us' - provides the theological grounding for the father's love in the novel. Robert Boughton's love for Jack is precisely love while Jack is still a sinner - not contingent on repentance, reform, or resolution. This unconditional quality is what makes it both beautiful and painful: the father loves Jack in his destruction as fully as in any imagined restoration.
Author and Context
Marilynne Robinson (b. 1943) wrote Home simultaneously with Lila, working on both manuscripts at the same time - an unusual compositional approach that reflects the novels' complementary perspectives. She has described Home as in some ways the more painful novel to write, because it required her to inhabit the experience of failure and gracelessness from the inside - to understand Jack Boughton not just as the object of others' concern but as a person trying and failing to become who he wishes he could be.
The novel's Iowa setting draws on Robinson's long residence in Iowa City, where she has taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop since 1991. The Calvinist theological framework reflects her lifelong engagement with Calvin, Edwards, and the American Reformed tradition.
Plot Summary
Glory Boughton, the youngest of the eight Boughton children, has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father after her engagement has ended badly. Jack - her brilliant, charming, self-destructive brother - arrives unexpectedly, and Glory watches as her father and her brother navigate the complex terrain of a homecoming that is not quite a reconciliation and not quite a failure.
The novel's plot is deliberately thin. Most of the action consists of conversations, meals, silences, and small domestic acts. Jack drinks; he struggles against drinking; he tends the garden; he works on an old car. He and Glory talk, guardedly and then more openly. Jack reveals that he has a wife - a Black woman named Della - and a son, living in Memphis, whom he cannot support because of laws preventing interracial marriage in the South. This revelation transforms the novel's domestic story into an engagement with the racial crisis of the 1950s.
The novel ends not with Jack's restoration but with his departure - unable to stay, unable to find peace in Gilead, heading back to a life that remains unresolved. Robert Boughton dies shortly after. The ending is genuinely open: Jack is not redeemed in any conventional sense, and the parable's resolution remains aspirational rather than achieved.
Theological Significance
The novel's most significant theological contribution is its refusal to complete the parable. In Luke 15, the father runs, the son is restored, the feast is held. In Home, the father loves with the same unconditional quality, but the son leaves without the feast. This is not a contradiction of the parable but an extension of it: Robinson asks what it looks like when the prodigal does not stay, when the grace is extended but not received, when the father's love is real and the son's inability to receive it is equally real.
This raises the theological question of the limits of grace - not whether God's grace is unlimited, but whether there are people who, for reasons of character and circumstance and history, find themselves unable to receive it. Jack is not a villain; he is a person who wants to be good and cannot figure out how, who wants to come home and cannot find a home that fits him. The novel treats this condition with compassion rather than judgment, while refusing the sentimentality of a resolution that the characters have not earned.
Critical Reception
The novel received widespread critical praise, with most reviewers recognizing it as a worthy companion to Gilead rather than a repetition of it. James Wood wrote that Home was 'harder, drier, and more painful' than Gilead - a judgment that most readers have confirmed. The Orange Prize jury praised its combination of theological depth and novelistic restraint.
Some readers found the novel's deliberate plotlessness frustrating. The extended domestic scenes - meals, silences, small acts of care - require patience and an appreciation of the biblical and theological resonances that give them weight. Without that framework, the novel can seem merely uneventful.
Legacy
Together with Gilead, Home has established Robinson as the preeminent American religious novelist. Jack (2020), the final volume in which Jack Boughton's interracial marriage in the Jim Crow South becomes the center of narrative attention, extends the theological questions of Home into a more politically engaged context, connecting the novel's theology of grace to the racial politics of mid-century America.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study Luke 15:11-32 (the Prodigal Son parable) and its two companion parables (the lost sheep and the lost coin), along with Genesis 27 (the blessing of Jacob and the cry of Esau), Romans 5:6-11 (love while still sinners), and 1 Corinthians 13 (love that 'beareth all things'). Calvin's Institutes Book III on justification and adoption provides theological background.
Further Reading
- Alex Engebretson, Understanding Marilynne Robinson (2017) - the best critical study, with detailed chapters on both Gilead and Home. - Timothy Larsen and Keith L. Johnson, eds., Theology and Literature After Postmodernity (2015) - includes essays on Robinson's theological achievement in the Gilead quartet. - Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things: Essays (2015) - Robinson's own theological essays, essential context for the novels.