MARILYNNE ROBINSON’S Lila is the love story we thought we already knew, but didn’t. Lila takes us back to Gilead, Iowa, the same setting as Robinson’s novels Gilead and Home, describing the backstory and courtship of old Rev. Ames and the much younger Lila from a completely new point of view.
In Gilead, Ames describes his immediate, unlikely love for Lila, the hard-working wanderer. But Ames’ description of the feeling of love is more vivid than his description of the woman he loves.
The reverse is true in Lila. We learn Lila’s story through thick third-person prose. Robinson’s narration often reflects Lila’s stream of consciousness—a scattered, questioning pattern of thought, apt for a woman digesting the idea of small-town permanency after an exciting, scary, shame-filled life on the road. In the novel’s opening scene, Lila is just a small child, neglected and dying on the front steps of her house. Doll, a loving and hardened itinerant, kidnaps her just in time. It’s unclear if Doll stole or saved Lila. We can’t ever be sure. Either way, her love for Lila is fierce, and Lila comes to depend on it as they travel around the country, living off of door-to-door labor and inside jokes.
Doll is out of the picture by the time Lila arrives in Gilead, but her memory and influence remain in the forefront of Lila’s mind, in the form of mantras and rules for living: Can’t trust nobody. Don’t stay nowhere too long. Churches just want your money. Might as well take pleasure where you can. These are the commandments and proverbs that provide a semblance of structure and guidance for this unchurched nomad.
Suddenly Lila is no longer just the stoic godsend we met in Gilead. She is a loyal gardener, skilled drifter, lousy prostitute, and, eventually, ambivalent wife.
Lila is an outsider in every way: an existentially curious agnostic in a town with more churches than grocery stores and a rootless orphan moving into a house where the same family has lived for generations. Robinson skillfully uses Lila’s outsider status to voice the questions, big and small, that many believers and nonbelievers alike have wondered but rarely asked:
On worship: Why sing hymns “to somebody who had lived and died like anybody”? On Sundays: “What use was there in calling a day by a certain name, or thinking of it as anything but weather?” On unbelief: “How could it be that none of it mattered?” On shooting stars: How come “some stars came unstuck and the others didn’t”? On salvation: “What happens to you if you’re lost?”
Through Lila, Robinson pushes us out of Christian complacency into a realm of holy curiosity, and we are all the better for it.
This is a woman with a “scared, wild heart” trying earnestly to understand existence. Trying to figure out why she “bothers” with it at all. Lila “had thought a thousand times about the ferociousness of things so that it might not surprise her entirely when it showed itself again.” She wants life, even as she expects the worst. And when it comes to moving in with her “beautiful old man” of a husband, she just doesn’t know what to expect. After all, “she had never been at home in all the years of her life.”
Ames never expected a woman to come and save him from the loneliness with which he’d become familiar, even friendly. And Ames, in his own patient preacher kind of way, either saves or steals Lila from a dangerous, transient life. Probably both.
There is something to learn from the wildness of life—and from the tameness of home. Rev. Ames and Lila have much to offer to each other and to readers:
“‘There’s a lot I haven’t figured out. Pretty well everything.’
“He took her hand and swung it as they walked, a happy man. ‘I feel exactly the same way. I really do. So this should be very interesting.’”
Very interesting indeed. Robinson always finds a way to make theology accessible and beautiful. In Lila, she makes it romantic as well.
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