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.