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Picador

Lila (Oprah's Book Club): A Novel

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A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK"Marilynne Robinson's LILA is an enthralling meditation on belief, suffering and grace." ―O, the Oprah Magazine"Writing in lovely, angular prose that has the high loneliness of an old bluegrass tune, Ms. Robinson has created a balladlike story . . . The novel is powerful and deeply affecting . . . Ms. Robinson renders [Lila's] tale with the stark poetry of Edward Hopper or Andrew Wyeth. ― The New York TimesGrade: A Emotionally and intellectually challenging, it's an exploration of faith in God, love, and whatever else it takes to survive.” ―Entertainment WeeklyA new American classic from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gilead, Marilynne Robinson returns to the town of Gilead in an unforgettable story of a girlhood lived on the fringes of society in fear, awe, and wonder.Marilynne Robinson, one of the greatest novelists of our time, returns to the town of Gilead in an unforgettable story of a girlhood lived on the fringes of society in fear, awe, and wonder.Lila, homeless and alone after years of roaming the countryside, steps inside a small-town Iowa church-the only available shelter from the rain-and ignites a romance and a debate that will reshape her life. She becomes the wife of a minister, John Ames, and begins a new existence while trying to make sense of the life that preceded her newfound security.Neglected as a toddler, Lila was rescued by Doll, a canny young drifter, and brought up by her in a hardscrabble childhood. Together they crafted a life on the run, living hand to mouth with nothing but their sisterly bond and a ragged blade to protect them. Despite bouts of petty violence and moments of desperation, their shared life was laced with moments of joy and love. When Lila arrives in Gilead, she struggles to reconcile the life of her makeshift family and their days of hardship with the gentle Christian worldview of her husband which paradoxically judges those she loves.Revisiting the beloved characters and setting of Robinson's Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead and Home, a National Book Award finalist, Lila is a moving expression of the mysteries of existence that is destined to become an American classic. Read more


Publisher ‏ : ‎ Picador Paper; Reissue edition (August 4, 2020)


Language ‏ : ‎ English


Paperback ‏ : ‎ 272 pages


ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1250784034


ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 32


Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8.2 ounces


Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.47 x 0.72 x 8.31 inches


Best Sellers Rank: #90,114 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #3,824 in Family Life Fiction (Books) #6,508 in American Literature (Books) #6,938 in Literary Fiction (Books)


#3,824 in Family Life Fiction (Books):


#6,508 in American Literature (Books):


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Top Amazon Reviews

    • A life of poverty and rootlessness rescued by quiet benevolence
Marilynne Robinson’s third of her novels set in Gilead, Iowa in the middle of the 20th century focuses on the quiet, much younger wife of the elderly Reverend John Ames. Lila was seen peripherally in ‘Gilead’ and then appeared in ‘Home’ sporadically in visits between the Ames and Boughton families in which she spoke rarely but, when she did, offering comments of simple wisdom. ‘Lila’ depicts her deprived, poverty-stricken and rootless life before and after she meets Ames. Though no definite year is given for when most events occur, Lila is a very young, abused and neglected little girl of about four or five, presumably in the early years of the Depression. Knowing the family a bit and seeing the abuse first hand, a lady known only as “Doll” abducts her from the family and looks after her with more motherly love and protection than Lila’s own mother ever did. Doll is the child’s only home and source of security when they begin their roaming, migrant life. They get sporadic work with a makeshift family consisting of a man named Doane and his wife Marcelle, and another family that has a child named Mellie. Like the families in ‘The Grapes of Wrath’, they move from place to place somewhere in the vicinity of Kansas or Missouri. Lila is not even Lila’s real name, which she never knew, just one that Doll likes. Doll is a fierce protector of Lila and eventually kills a man with her knife. Lila wonders if this man was her real father but is never certain. Doll gives her the knife after she is arrested, just before Lila has to move on. She carries the knife like it’s a holy amulet, the only possession she treasures. The novel is seen through Lila’s point of view and switches back and forth from her adult life back to her childhood, eventually filling in most of the blanks between when her life with Doll began and the time that she sought shelter from a storm in the sanctuary of Ames’ church in Gilead. She had been wandering until she found a shack outside the town which did little to keep out the rain. The romance and subsequent marriage between Lila and Ames takes a wary yet curious trajectory before either of them can settle into a position approximating security. Lila has had to build up defenses around herself and not depend on any possible bonds or circumstances that might be ripped out of her life. Doll was her center but then Doll was taken out of her life. At some point she ended up in a brothel in St. Louis but never was successful as a prostitute so the madam, only known as “Mrs.”, decided to let her stay on for a while as a cleaning lady. All of these episodes in Lila’s past life are presented glancingly and never really in their context in the linear chain of cause and effect of personal backstory. When she appears in Ames’ life, he sees her arrival as a gift of Grace. He has lived the same solitary life for forty years since his first wife died in childbirth along with their baby. He offers Lila food, shelter, and as much understanding as she requires, without making reciprocal requests. Lila is wary of his theology. She cannot accept that Doll, or herself for that matter, will be consigned to everlasting Hell for doing nothing but attempting to survive and live in peace. She is relieved to find that Ames doesn’t adhere to that view either. “Thinking about hell doesn’t help me live the way I should. I believe this is true for most people. And thinking that other people might go to hell just feels evil to me, like a very grave sin. I don’t want to encourage anyone else to think that way. Even if you don’t assume that you can know in individual cases, it’s still a problem to think about people in general as if they might go to hell. You can’t see the world the way you ought to if you let yourself do that. Any judgment of that kind is a great presumption. And presumption is a very grave sin. I believe this is sound theology, in its way.” Lila replies, “I don’t understand theology. I don’t think I like it. Lots of folks live and die and never worry themselves about it.” Ames sympathizes and realizes that he’s preached and talked theology with Boughton for too many years to remember that there are people in the world like Lila. Lila’s perpetual wanderlust and rootlessness even emerges in her consciousness while she is pregnant, thinking that she’ll stay with Boughton through the birth and reserve the right to take her baby and leave him. However, she gradually accepts that his kindness and love for her will only disappear once he dies, which she doesn’t want to dwell on as long as she doesn’t have to. After the birth Boughton insists on baptizing the baby as soon as possible. Unlike Ames, is a fierce believer in baptism to rescue someone, even an innocent newborn infant, from eternal hellfire. He felt the same grief regarding his own son in the previous novel. Christian theology is still a current running through ‘Lila’ just as it had in ‘Home’ and, to the largest extent, ‘Gilead’, but that just seems to be part of the territory with Robinson’s ‘Gilead’ novels, especially if a minister is one of the main characters. I said regarding ‘Home’ that each of Robinson’s novels have very small casts of characters. That still holds for ‘Lila’. Even though other characters appear at various points in Lila’s pre-Gilead/Ames life such as Doane and Marcelle and Mellie in the migrant days or Mrs. and her set of prostitutes in the St. Louis brothel, none of them are anything more than background. ‘Lila’ is essentially a two-character novel. These dialectical pairs of characters seem to be the major colors of the pallet from which she paints her word canvases. Lila has absorbed some generosity of spirit in spite of her distrust of humans. Once when she returns to her shack, she finds a very dirty boy sleeping in her shack. The main things of value for her in that shack are some dollar bills and that heirloom knife. The boy got fed up with his violent father, smashed his head with a skillet, and ran off, thinking he has killed him. He is very frightened. She gives him the money but insists that he return the knife to her. Although she thinks of that boy as the thief on the cross beside Jesus, she did what she could for him, embodying Jesus’ dictum, “If you’ve done it to the least of these, you’ve done it to me.” At the end, Lila maintains a semblance of balance between faith and defense. She tells Ames that she’ll keep the knife with her. She knows she’s brought a helpless child into “a world where a wind could rise that would take him from her arms as if there were no strength in them at all.” For now, she has geraniums in the window and peace in her heart and with her new family, for however long it lasts. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 12, 2020 by BOB
    • Gilead, Home, and the Undertow of Transience
So Marilynne Robinson returns once more to the small Iowa town immortalized in her Pulitzer Prizewinning novel GILEAD ; is there really enough material there for three books? When HOME , the second novel, came out, my answer was almost but not quite. Now with LILA, I have no doubt. This is every bit as rich and self-contained a book as either of its predecessors, a deeply moving meditation on life, love, and God. It is the simplest of the three novels, and the earliest in time, essentially the story of how the elderly preacher John Ames meets and marries his second wife, a former drifter who goes by the name of Lila. But it is also the most complex, weaving past and present, thought and action, together into a multi-layered texture that reminds me strongly of Faulkner -- another writer who mined riches from the lives of a few families in a restricted rural location. It is a work of heartbreaking beauty. We meet Lila as a very young child, stolen from a house where she has been neglected and left to die. Her rescuer is a drifter named Doll. She nurses the girl back to health, and joins a small group of other transients, living by doing odd jobs until the Depression and the Dust Bowl force them to split up. At one point, Doll stays put for long enough for Lila to get a year of schooling. It is enough to teach her to read and do arithmetic; she is a very bright student. Somehow, parted from Doll, Lila ends up in Gilead, living in a deserted shack outside the town, and offering gardening and household help to meet her small needs. Before long, she has met John Ames, one of the town's two preachers, an elderly widower. When she calls on him one morning, he offers her coffee, and asks her to tell him a little about herself: -- She shook her head. "I don't talk about that. I just been wondering lately why things happen the way they do." -- "Oh!" he said. "Then I'm glad you have some time to spare. I've been wondering about that more or less my whole life." Lila's question and Ames' attempt to answer it form the theological mainspring of the book. For in addition to being a story of two lonely people coming together, this is also a book about religious belief, more explicitly so than either of its predecessors. Those who have read GILEAD (though that is not necessary*) will know what a beautiful character John Ames is: a man of God, but a modest and above all a kind one. Christianity is in his bones and blood, and yet there is nothing doctrinaire about him; he talks to God, but has no time for Hell; his is a religion of welcome, never exclusion. His world is an extremely attractive one for me, as a former believer who remains interested in religion's attempts to answer the big questions, but utterly resists signing up for any faith. I should say, however, that this is far from theology for the masses. The books in her stolen Bible that Lila copies out to improve her handwriting, and ponders as she does so, are among the most difficult ones, Ezekiel and Job. "It could be that the wildest, strangest things in the Bible," she thinks, "were the places where it touched earth." Without fully understanding them, Lila is attracted to the verses in Ezekiel about the lightning and the whirlwind, or the babe abandoned in the field, weltering in its blood. Ames too tries to make the Bible touch earth: in affirming its relevance to his own life, explaining it to Lila, respecting the wild thing that she is, and building trust and tenderness between them. Marilynne Robinson's 1980 novel HOUSEKEEPING , written almost a quarter-century before her next one, GILEAD, is also about drifters. Its back cover contains a phrase that has long stuck with me, "The dangerous undertow of transience." I am struck by how Robinson's themes keep folding back on each other: transience, Gilead, home. I had always thought of home as a place to settle, a place to build, and place that you would never have to leave again. But in LILA, Robinson shows that the undertow of transience is always present, too. Even after they are married, Lila is not fully ready to settle with Ames, and he also accepts that she is liable to go off at any moment. This is where the influence of Faulkner comes in. It is not simply a matter of present-day narrative and flashbacks. Past and present are folded together inextricably, each growing within the other. At all times, Lila carries with her the memories of where she has been, what she has suffered, and the people she has loved. Gradually, we learn more about her, and come to revise our estimates of her age, background, and character. She is no angel, and has been through more than we ever knew. But we come to see her as truly a good person, and Ames' love becomes in turn our own. A small example. After Lila has given birth to the young son whom we will glimpse in GILEAD, Ames decides to take him fishing. Lila imagines telling the story to him once he is old enough to understand: -- He had his pole and creel in his hand and you in the crook of his arm and he went off down the road in the morning sunshine, striding along like a younger man, talking to you, laughing. He came back an hour later. He set the empty creel on the table and said, "We propped the pole and watched dragonflies. Then we got a little tired." And what a look he gave her, in the sorrow of his happiness. With countless scenes like that, Marilynne Robinson offers her readers a radiant gift. And that final phrase is sheer genius. *I would go further and urge that you read LILA first, if you have not read GILEAD. Otherwise, read this as though it were first. This counteracts the tendency to see the book as merely the back-story of a character being groomed for a minor role in the more famous novel, and Lila can appear as the wild force that she is, as protagonist in her own right. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 13, 2014 by Roger Brunyate

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