In my father's house

 

Review of Home by Marilynne Robinson. 

During the height of Covid I remember catching this Pew Research statistic about how half of US adults between 18 and 30 are living at home with their parents, the most in history since the great depression. I was shocked, although the more I thought about it the less surprising it felt to me. Lots more people attending college these days and it makes financial sense to stay with your parents from 18 to 22, which ended up being the biggest share of that statistic. When I looked at ages 25 - 35; less than 20% of adults live at home with their parents. 

Why was the initial statistic so shocking to me though? And why is the statistical increase of 25 -35 y/os still so newsworthy to so many. The answer is pretty simple; living with your parents sucks.

I'm sure there are a lot of books out there where characters of various ages live at home with their parents. Home by Marilynne Robinson is specifically and thematically intent on exploring the return home as adult children. Returning to the universe of her novel Gilead, Home centers around the same cast of characters but with a different focus. The Reverend Ames is just a backdrop, instead the story of Home is told from the perspective of Glory, one of the Reverend Boughton's daughters.

Glory has returned home to live with and care for her ailing and aging father. Almost all of her other siblings are living their best lives with their husbands and wives and children and careers, but Glory has retreated home; leaving a failed engagement she told everyone was actually a marriage, abandoning her career and dreams if a family in the wake. 

The only other of the Boughton offspring is the estranged, criminal atheist son Jack. Readers of Gilead - and I'll note here you don't have to have been a reader of Gilead to read Home - will know some things about Jack that I won't spoil here. Suffice it to say he joins Glory in the great post-failure return home after nearly 20 years away with no contact. 

Robinson is a masterful writer, which generally means she can pack an entire universe of meaning into a small gesture or a broken-off sentence. She shows incredible prowess in Home, crafting in Boughton the epitome of an annoying, old dad, Jack as the redemptive villain, and Glory as the pitiful lost soul. The three, with guest appearances like Reverend Ames or a random other Boughton sibling, navigate all your least favorite topics that come up when you visit your provincial hometown; religion (of course), past and ancient personal offenses, politics, racism, even vaccines make a brief conversational appearance (polio). 

Home is completely comprised of Robinson at her best. There are no Randian rhetorical flashes of a character letting loose a torrent of theology or ideology, but rather the constant striving an aging family has to make, huddled together at their worst point, to love one another and themselves. It is moving in that you feel you are striving right along with them. 

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As an aside, I needed a return to fiction after a long stint of almost exclusively non-fiction. Non-fiction was beginning to depress me severely, reading was becoming a chore and I was despairing at how little I was retaining. Home was a perfect entryway back into the novel. Moving, life affirming, a story of hope and forgiveness even in the midst of loss and tragedy and strife. I think I'll be grateful to it for a long time.

Why Do I Love Karl Ove Knausgaard?

 

Book II of My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard. 

I started the 600-page book II of the My Struggle series in, according to my Goodreads account, December of 2022. I devoured a good portion of it and stopped to focus on some books about climate change. I read two books and then picked it back up. 

This is not to suggest I was getting bored with Knausgaard, in fact, I couldn't wait to get back to it, but I couldn't get through 600 pages in time to get to some other texts I had planned to read for a personal writing project. 

This is all to say there has to be something I really love about Knausgaard's work, something that really drives me to read it. Which is funny because it really shouldn't; the text isn't exactly suspenseful, it is certainly poetic but not classically, grippingly so. The narrative itself is practically absent, I could pick it up after reading two other books and it's not like I had to really remind myself of what happened because everything is only conceptually connected rather than by pieced together with important plot points. 

There is some faint reliability in what I'm reading in My Struggle, but just barely. In my brief review of Book I in 2017 I seemed to feel the same way (I also didn't even appear to like it that much but that's strange because I look back fondly on it now). It's not called "Your Struggle" for a reason. When I read Book I about his adolescent years and his relationship with his father in his 20s, I was also reconciling some personal relationships with my father and thinking a lot about my high school days/early 20s (since they were coming to an end). 

In Part II Knausgaard reflects on becoming a father and a husband, as well as his struggles to balance these things with his career as a writer. I was reading this in between having my two children and also balancing my career, so there are obviously a lot of really relatable aspects of the book in theory.

When Knausgaard gives the harrowing account of his wife giving birth I was instantly transported to memories of my own wife giving birth. Taking his children to Rhyme Time at the local library, navigating awkward conversations with his in-laws; very "been there, done that". 

Except there is a lot that I don't share with Knausgaard. The intense self-loathing and doubt, the disdain with which he regards so much around him. I was struck in that same scene where he takes his children to the music program at the library, or really any scene in which his wife and children are present, how self-centered and critical he was of himself. Terrified of the way he appeared. 

It's a reoccurring theme in Part II; how he appears to strangers when his pregnant wife accidentally gets locked in the bathroom and a boxer has to kick in the door, how he appears to other parents at the daycare co-op when another child is dunking on him, the last 50 pages of the book is a torrent of Knausgaard obsessing over how he comes off in a literary magazine interview. While I can imagine myself in these situations and settings, really a majority of situations and settings Knausgaard finds himself in, the suspense comes from the rising panic in Knausgaard himself, something I don't share but find endlessly fascinating. 

The actual events of Knausgaard's life are seamlessly transitioned; you're taken from Knausgaard with three children living in Norway and attending a fair, to Knausgaard meeting his soon-to-be wife Linda at a conference, to giving birth, to living with two children, one child etc etc. It flows so incredibly well as though you were simply in conversation with Knausgaard, which is emphasized all the more with the punctuated philosophical flourishes that Knausgaard will spontaneously put forward. 

These reveries, short and sporadic enough to not be overbearing or preachy, are just another aspect that drives my interest in My Struggle. I remember enjoying it in Book I, which usually waded into thoughts of death and eternity. Book II also dwells on the themes of the novel and offers some truly impactful writing on the nature of parenthood, on being in love, and on the nature of fiction itself.

Only 19 pages in and we get this beautifully articulated paragraph on parenthood:

"When I think of my three children it is not only their distinctive faces that appear before me, but also the quite distinct feeling they radiate. This feeling, which is constant, is what they 'are' for me. And what they 'are' has been present in them ever since the first day I saw them. At that time they could barely do anything, and the little bit they could do, like sucking on a breath, raising their arms as reflex actions, looking at their surroundings, imitating, they could all do that, thus what they 'are' has nothing to do with qualities, has nothing to do with what they can or can't do, but is more a kind of light that shines within them."  

Poetic, conversational, and relatably human is probably everything I could say to explain my fascination with what could easily be described as a boring, insular, and too-long book. Which I would imagine seems inadequate, I might have just had good timing. It seems Book 3 is about his childhood, the final installation (Book 6) is apparently about Hitler (so I've heard), so time will tell if timing is really everything as I continue to pick up Knausgaard.