«Гайлид» Мэрилинн Робинсон: Семейная хроника и переосмысление кальвинизма

2004 novel by Marilynne Robinson

Gilead is a novel written by Marilynne Robinson published in 2004. It won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It is Robinson's second novel, following Housekeeping (1980). Gilead is an epistolary novel, as the entire narrative is a single, continuing, albeit episodic, document, written on several occasions in a form combining a journal and a memoir. It comprises the fictional autobiography of John Ames, an elderly, white Congregationalist pastor in the small, secluded town of Gilead, Iowa (also fictional), who knows that he is dying of a heart condition. At the beginning of the book, the date is established as 1956, and Ames explains that he is writing an account of his life for his seven year old son, who will have few memories of him. Ames indicates he was born in 1880 and that, at the time of writing, he is seventy six years old.

The book is an account of the memories and legacy of John Ames as he remembers his experiences of his father and grandfather to share with his son. All three men share a vocational lifestyle and profession as Congregationalist ministers in Gilead, Iowa. John Ames describes his vocation as "giving you a good basic sense of what is being asked of you and also what you might as well ignore", explaining that your vocation is something both hard to fulfill and hard to obtain.

The book was published to wide acclaim from literary critics. On BookBrowse, a site that aggregates book reviews such as media reviews, the book received a 5/5 from "Critics' Opinion". The book also, based on critics reviews on BookBrowse, ranged from solely a "5/5" score. In a poll of US literary critics that was conducted by BBC Culture and had its results shared in January 2015, Gilead was voted the fourth greatest novel written since 2000. In 2019, the novel was ranked 2nd on The Guardian list of the 100 best books of the 21st century. On November 5, 2019, the BBC News listed Gilead on its list of the 100 most influential novels. Former President of the United States Barack Obama lists the novel as one of his favorites.

Gilead has been recognized as a text that works to correct modern misconceptions regarding John Calvin, Calvinism, and the Puritans. Robinson said in a lecture entitled "The Freedom of a Christian," that she thinks "that one of the things that has happened in American Cultural History is that John Calvin has been very much misrepresented. As a consequence of that, the parts of American Culture that he influenced are very much misrepresented". Roger Kimball, in his review of The Death of Adam in The New York Times wrote, "We all know that the Puritans were dour, sex hating, joy abominating folk – except that, as Robinson shows, this widely embraced caricature is a calumny". The common modern characterization of the Calvinists as haters of the physical world and joyless exclusivists is the stereotype that Robinson works to deconstruct in Gilead through a representation of what she considers to be a more accurate understanding of Calvinist doctrine that she derives mainly from the original texts, specifically Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion. The novel has also been the focus of debates on Christian multiculturalism in literature. University of Victoria professor of American Literature Christopher Douglas claims that Gilead builds a "contemporary Christian multicultural identity suitably cleansed of the complexity of [ ] 'Christian slavery'." He contextualizes the work within the political resurgence of fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity in the last four decades. Former President of the United States Barack Obama lists the novel as one of his favorites. On September 14, 2015, in Des Moines, Iowa, in a reversal of the usual journalistic convention, President Obama interviewed Marilynne Robinson for The New York Review of Books, and told her,

Robinson has used characters and events from Gilead in three subsequent novels to date. Home (2008) retells events of the story from the perspective of their friends and neighbors the Boughtons. Lila (2014) retells the Ames's courtship and marriage from her perspective. Jack (2020) tells the story of the Boughtons' black sheep, further detailing his relationship with a woman of color, a union unknown to his family.