A (3:38)

Yeah. And so where our critical and I guess, consciousness, conscious sensibilities, alignment. Also, like you say, the New York Times best books of the century so far list. You and I have both had a vote in that. And we both of our. We got what, five? Or did we get 10?

B (3:52)

I think we got 10.

A (3:53)

We got 10. But it took one of those coveted spots of that torturous process for us a painful pleasure to be a part of that. Did you happen to look. Where was it on the reader list? I meant to go look.

B (4:05)

Oh, I didn't check.

A (4:06)

Yeah, I'm sure it made it up there. But the critics at least instantly acclaimed and then continues to be. You're not. It's a paperback favorite, but not on the order of like Ann Patchett, because it is more intellectually, spiritually, existentially rigorous. It's funny, I was just reading the Correspondent by Virginia Evans. Like, I don't want to talk about that book because who knows in three years, and I hope people are listening to this episode three years from now when they're looking for Something on Gilead. But I think this does the kind of thing that a lot of people wanted a book club fiction book to do, but at the highest possible level, with rigor and intellect and complexity and beauty that is more than one standard deviation away from very, very competent, very enjoyable, very good books like this.

B (4:53)

Yeah, I just looked. So this was number 25 on Reader's Best of the Century. So still very highly ranking. But to sort of situate it in that context you're talking about Demon Copperhead by Barbara King Solver was number one. And also an excellent, very well written, very good and highly acclaimed book, but friendlier. I just read it a couple of weeks ago, like a much more approachable book. Which is not to say that Gilead is not approachable, but you can just kind of sink right into Demon Copperhead and you're off to the races. And it doesn't hurt also that that's a more recent book than Gilead is. We're now talking about 22 years old.

A (5:30)

And Robinson doesn't really care about plot. That that's not what she. There is really no plot, such as it is. We'll talk about in a minute. But it does not have the what's going to happen? Are they going to get together? Who's going to die? Like, it just doesn't have that mechanical plot.

B (5:44)

There's a little bit of a mystery, though.

A (5:46)

Yeah, a little bit of one. But it is very, very subtle. And we actually once it's sort of revealed to be a banal sort of regular old humans being human kinds of things. But it doesn't have the big epic family kind of a story or, you know, interpersonal drama. It does have that drama, but it's not portrayed dramatically, which usually pushes something over top to be a bestseller. Patron, though it sold very well over time. I guess that's a way of spoiling the very quick synopsis, Rebecca, because we're actually doing this a second. We'll do. If you want to hear more about this in the office hours, which is one of our levels of our Patreon. We're going to record this right after. We're going to do two things. One, I have here in front of me. This is not my original copy. My original copy. I'm not sure what happened to it, but I read this, I guess about 12 years ago now with a group of students in a kind of off the books book club when I was teaching. It wasn't an official thing, but they wanted. There wasn't a great books course at this place I was teaching and they wanted that. So I was like, I will sign up. And they wanted something that was recent. I suggested this and here are my tabs. I did not go back and look at these. So we're going to play what did Jeff highlight 21 years ago? Actually, no, this is only 12 year roulette. And then we'll also talk about casting because you have the note here. You beat me to it. But that Scorsese has the rights to this and has threatened to adapt this, much to our delight and fear. And we're gonna do a little casting game. So that's what we're gonna do in the office hours today, everybody.

B (7:11)

I also have my original copy of Gilead. I bought a fresh one for this exercise, but my OG copy is behind me. I can pull it down off the shelf when we get into office hours. So you can do that. You can sign up for the free newsletter or become a member at one of the paid levels@patreon.com 02 well read. And whether you're gonna do that or not, we hope you are enjoying what you're listening to. And if you would take a min, that five star rating on whatever your podcaster of choice is, Apple, Podcasts, Spotify, wherever, it really helps us find our way to new listeners. If you've got a minute to write a review, we would certainly appreciate that. And if you have feedback questions for us about this book, the show in general, life, the universe and everything, you can email us at zero to well

A (7:51)

read bookriot.com and as people will have heard, I'm trying to get my tense right based on the based on the order of episodes, you you will have heard in our mailbag that we will respond to a question about something we did a while ago. So if you've got a Gilead feedback or any kind of feedback there, especially if it's interesting, provocative or additive to our discussion or understanding, we're especially interested there. Thanks so much to listening and for writing in. All right, Rebecca, without further ado, the plot is what what is this? What what happens in Gilead?

B (8:22)

Okay, so this book is two of our shared favorite themes, Old Men Waiting to Die and Fathers and Sons man,

A (8:29)

which the Venn diagram of those two is very like, very it's very close.

B (8:35)

It's not quite a circle, but it's close to a circle. So this is it starts in 1956 in a small town in Iowa called Gilead Fictional Town, and it is narrated by Reverend John Ames. He is 76 years old he's a pastor in the Congregationalist church. His father was a pastor, his grandfather was a pastor. His family came from this place. He has lived his whole life there. And he's in the twilight of his life. He's recognizing his wife who he met late in life and who is much younger than he is, and his young son are going to live many, many years without him. So he sits down to record his history. It's reflections for his son really to read as he grows up. So it's not written directly as letters, but it has that journal or epistolary feel to it because there's really one intended reader of this account and it is his son, who's 7 years old at the time. So threaded throughout these reflections are stories from Ames own family history. He had a radical abolitionist grandfather who fought alongside John A Jayhawker. Yeah, there's a long running rift between Rev. Ames's father and his brother over his brother's development of becoming an atheist. And then Ames also spends a lot of time, really mostly very lovely, reflecting on his lifelong friendship with Robert Boughton, who is the Presbyterian minister in town and his best friend, lifelong best friend. And Boughton has an estranged son named Jack who, who is really central to some of Reverend Ames concerns at the time of this writing. And what those concerns are and why they weigh so heavy on Ames is the question. If there is any question that threads through the book, it's what has Jack done that Reverend Ames is so worried about that feels so risky to him of his wife and his son maybe being more around this man after he dies, Jack has returned home because Reverend Botten is also near the end of his life and that return and that reckoning is central to the plot. Such as there is a plot to this book. So it's personal memories, spiritual musings, friendships, family relationships, just all the stuff of life is here. Jeff?

A (10:44)

Yeah, we don't know why Ames picked up the pen at this particular moment. He's gotten a relatively recent diagnosis, you know, such as is like there's something wrong with his heart.

B (10:55)

That's all like he's not stand up too fast.

A (10:57)

He's not, he's not supposed to go walking around his wife Lila, like when he goes to walk, when she, he doesn't tell her where he's going, she's. She's like did you just die somewhere? He. So it could be any particular moment. And then, you know, as we do in this show, we're going to start with the whole thing all the way through it Ends in a way like we don't know. Did he decide to stop writing? Has he completed his testament? Or possibly he died in the night and he would have written till it's an it doesn't feel like it doesn't feel incomplete, but nor does it feel exhaustive. His own musings. This is the kind of document that his own consciousness evolves. He's uncovering things that he thinks and feels as he's writing. That's how you know it's written by a writer. Because people who write know. This is what happens when you write is you uncover, reveal, and even shape what you think and what you feel as you try to capture what you thought you were going to write as you began writing it.

B (11:48)

One of my pieces of marginalia at one point says, welcome to Journaling, Rev.

A (11:52)

Right.

B (11:53)

This is how it goes.

A (11:54)

Which is funny. I was reading. I'll get down to miscellaneous notes. I didn't do a lot of secondary reading here, but I did go back and return to her Paris Review interview in 2008, a great one, which is terrific. And it caused me to re up my subscription to the Paris Review. So good job. Paywall over there. But Robinson mentions her own struggles with journaling. So she's like, I'll buy a fancy journal at the claps. I'll scribble a few things and abandon it. It's like, so say we all. Marilyn Robinson.

B (12:21)

Like us.

A (12:21)

Just like us. But that is not what Reverend Ames does here. So what I. I was thinking about that in terms of she is not replicating a lived experience. She's create. She's imagining what someone journaling might be like.

B (12:33)

Yes.

A (12:33)

At this. Which I think is interesting at the same time.

B (12:36)

And a hell of a job she does with it. Like, it's so just beautiful and meditative.

A (12:41)

If we all journaled like this, we should all journal. I'm afraid most of us wouldn't journal like the good reference.

B (12:45)

Yeah. I mean I am a daily journaler and this just wants me to hide my. Like, makes me want to hide my face in shame. Like, this is. There's so much wisdom here. It's just so gorgeous. And Gilead will note it came out in 2004. It is now the first book in what became a quartet that moved back to in Home. Home came out in 2008. It's kind of a meanwhile to Gilead, we get to spend time in the Boughton household. Lila is out in 2014. That is about Reverend Ames's young wife. Her. Her life leading up to him and then how they met from her perspective. And then Jack came out in 2020 and is about Reverend Boughton's young son or older son, Jack, who is central to this story.

A (13:25)

The central achievement of Gilead to me is the creation of this consciousness that Reverend Ames is himself. His own perspective on himself, his rest, his very quotidian appreciation for daily life, plus his expertise and willingness to engage in ontological discourse and wrestle with the big picture, but also get down in the proverbial mud and appreciate his son playing catch or, you know, a sunbonnet or freckles on a daughter or something like this. Like that. Continuity of the divine is something that Robinson cares about. And one of the reasons she's going to cite Calvin over and over again is because that's something Calvin also thought. And then also, we get a lot of Carl Feuerbach here. I know all you Feuerbach heads are super excited. A German philosopher. But his critique, slash, I don't know, appreciation of the divine and Christianity is largely about whatever a understanding of God is. God being the expressions of what humans are, right? As a reflective sort of conversation or relationship of which God is not sort of up here. And we are down and everything else is down here, but it's sort of all over the place. And that is something that Robinson and Ames himself are super aware of. And they're super. They're super attentive to.

B (14:52)

She's just. She's operating on every level, and it's through her Reverend Ames is operating on every level that there is real intellectual life. There's so much life of the mind on these pages, but also life in the world. He reflects and even at one point says how much I. I have enjoyed my physical life. Just how great it is to have a body and go out into the world and look at stuff and feel the rain on. Feel the rain on your skin, as the song says. But that it's. That she can move into, in, in and through all of those spaces that we experience as humans and manage to capture that in this character is like the real wonder of this book. This. It feels like when someone is just sort of letting their mind wander or reflect. Like he moves from one topic sort of just into the next thing. We can see kind of where the writing sessions are for him and that he's occupied with this and then he's occupied with this other thing. And sometimes they flow right into each other as. As it is in your own mind when you're moving between thoughts. There's just a real naturalness to it. And to have a character who is so smart and so deliberate in his thinking and careful in his thinking and to capture that in a way that feels natural. It's just a wonder. This book is a wonder.

A (16:09)

It really is a tight. My ebook is 260 pages. I'm not actually sure what my print here is at the same time, why it's important. As we talked about it. It's something that's been acclaimed really from the beginning, as you said, the winning of the Pulitzer Prize. Her first book, Housekeeping, which came out 1902, also in the Pulitzer Prize. And she with one book, she kind of got the Iowa gig, you know, teaching at the Iowa's writer workshop, which is I don't know what the equivalent in other professions is. But that is a seat that is coveted and important and has led to a wonderful career, but pretty slight from the fiction point of view. There's Housekeeping and then the four books in the Gilead series, but a lot of nonfiction. And this is something I think is maybe I should put here rather than the miscellaneous. But like she really started out as a nonfiction writer and she stumbled into housekeeping when she was writing her dissertation or actually I don't think she's writing her decision. She was studying in college in grad school and she was collecting metaphors that like American thinkers would use, like Emerson especially like how they were using metaphors to get to where they were going. And she started collecting these images and writing some of her own and then put them together in Into Housekeeping. Like that's amazing that that was like your side hustle when you're working on your PhD that she did her PhD on Shakespeare's Henry IV. So a real one for us in

B (17:28)

that regard to toss out this debut novel that you write by accident, become a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. No big deal.

A (17:34)

No big deal.

B (17:35)

Just really impressive.

A (17:37)

And then two of the other three books in the Gilead series were also finals for the Pulitzer. And when the Orange fiction and finals for the Man Booker, like a new Marilynne Robinson novel and there have been many is like instant awards fodder. We would be drafting it in it. It's a literary event over the br pod there for sure. She also, you know, at the beginning was highly acclaimed. But then you'll say more about this because I think you went back and listened to her interview with Barack Obama. Barack Obama didn't elevate her. She needed no elevation. But put her in a conversation to be one of the most important thinkers of our Time you had this a little bit further down. I jumped up here. Marilyn Robinson was one of Time's most influential people in 2016. And then one of the just one of those people that people care who care about ideas and sensibilities in the humanities with a capital H. I think we point to her pretty quickly of who are we looking to for wisdom and erudition and calls to being better than we are. Is that fair to say, Rebecca?

B (18:37)

I think that's right. Yeah. The fiction is concerned with it. Her nonfiction is widely concerned with it. Her most recent work of nonfiction is a book all about the book of Genesis.

A (18:47)

Yes.

B (18:48)

But most of her nonfiction are collections of essays that really began as lectures. She is she's always out there speaking, giving talks, working to educate people on both on issues both literary and theological. She's basically an amateur theologian, but amateur seems like not quite enough for her.

A (19:09)

No form of the public intellectual theologian. I don't really have a. I don't really know what that phrase was would be but that's what it feels like.

B (19:15)

Yeah. The book, as you said, was just well received from the very beginning. In his review for The Times in 2004, the great critic James Wood described it as religious, somewhat essayistic and fiercely calm. Gilead is a beautiful work, demanding, grave and lucid, which I second all of those emotions. Kirkus called it a novel as big as a nation, as quiet as thought and as moving as prayer, matchless and towering. We're not going to do any better than that on this show, but we're going to have fun trying. And she won the Pulitzer for it. She was a finalist for the National Book Critics or she won the also won the National Book Critics Circle for fiction when it was released. As a side note, what was the National Book awards doing in 2004? Yeah, it was a lily took something about Paraguay.

A (20:01)

Yeah. The news from Paraguay.

B (20:02)

Yes. And the other four finalists are books that no one has thought of since 2004. So like a big loss for the National Book Awards there. Marilyn Robinson doing just fine though. And it's literary writing that's both high minded and plain spoken. Down to earth, accessible, but does feel so elevated. Oprah picked the whole quartet for her book club in 2021 after Jack came out. And I love this note that you have here that the Archbishop of Canterbury singled out Marilynne Robinson as the kind of writer the world needs. Needs. So certainly one of the ones that we're turning to for how to be a person in the world.

A (20:39)

Yeah. And you have here not for nothing. It's personally significant to us, which we'll get into. And I'll go and say here that my son, his name is Ames, not named after the good Reverend here. But as we were thinking of names and wanting something to be meaningful and different, we're like thinking of literary characters. And then once we said Ames, we're like, ooh, that's cool. And oh, is that cool? Like, it's a cool sounding name, but it comes out of a deep appreciation for the way of being that I think Marilynne Robinson is interested in. And certainly that Reverend Ames is exemplifying and striving for at the same time. I think that is part of it, is that to exemplify this kind of life is always to be in process. He himself does not think of his own sensibility, his own morality, his own spiritual life as being fixed or done, but always in a conscious of needing a perambulation into the field and needing reconsideration and a return to write and capture and then go back out and deliver another sermon and reconsider the scripture you've gone through a hundred times before. Robinson, herself a very interesting career, grew up in Idaho in the 40s and 50s. Her father worked in a lumber yard. Her brother became an art critic. So I'm not sure what was going on in the Robinson house. Like, what were they. What was the dinner table conversation like when Marilynne Robinson was a kid? I would love to know that she

B (21:59)

told Barack Obama in that interview that in her household there was like a. A great tolerance and celebration of weirdness. That everyone was kind of a weirdo in their own right.

A (22:09)

Shouts to the weirdos. Just everyone that we talk about on this. Every author is a weirdo in some way or another. Was raised Presbyterian, became a Congregationalist. She did some preaching. She talks about the parish review. If they needed someone, she would fill in. What a pinch hitter to have Marilyn Robinson, no kidding, for a day. She went to Pembroke College, which is. Which was the women's college at Brown, which I believe now is just fully integrated. So there may be a Pembroke hall or something, but that was Brown. She got her PhD in English from the University of Washington. Did her PhD on Shakespeare's Henry IV Part 2. Real zero to, well read core stuff out of Marilyn Robinson, both in her writing and in her own experience here. I told the story about housekeeping, so I won't repeat that.

B (22:50)

Yeah, she won the. At this point, well, in addition to all of the awards the individual books have won, Barack Obama awarded her the national humanities medal in 2012. That's how they first became acquainted. It starts a long friendship of them, like writing letters to each other. And Robinson gives an interview later on, Maybe it's around 2016, where she confesses that, like, sometimes she doesn't write him back on time. Or like, basically she leaves Barack Obama on red, which is just an amazing flex out of Marilyn Robinson. And then she won the Library of Congress Prize for American fiction in 2016. Also that year, as you mentioned at the top of the show, she was named to Times list of the 100 most influential people. And the citation was written by fellow novelist Colm Tobin.

A (23:36)

Yeah, really interesting on the biographical note, too. I think it's important to note, especially given the nature of this book and what we're going to talk about is that she has two sons and she had a husband and they were they've been divorced for 20, 30 years at some point. So those biographical details are salient but not determinative. And that's such as the way with the world. Rebecca, how did you first come to make a pilgrimage to Gilead, Iowa?

B (24:03)

If you're playing zero to well read bingo, you get to mark off the Barnes and Noble paperback favorites table. Once again, it was. I remember this so vividly. It was the summer of 2000. My husband and I had just gotten engaged. We were living in Lawrence, Kansas. So we're back in the Midwest from whence we hailed. Yeah. And I had just been seeing this around the bookstore. Like, the way that I found books at that time was just to go to the bookstore regularly and browse. And so I'm sure I had seen it. I saw the Pulitzer seal on it. I must have picked it up and read the very short synopsis on the back. And it just knocked me out. I, like, have a sense memory of the couch I was sitting on in that living room and just being like, oh, like, this is the. So powerful. I was. I was like 26, 24. I was 24. And to have this, like, reflected wisdom offered up from even a fictional person at the end of their life reflecting on love and family when I was just starting towards getting married and thinking about what family might mean for me was incredibly significant. And having grown up in the church, but moved away from it and into a life that I hope is intellectual and humanist and connected to the beauty of the world, there was language and a way of thinking about life here that became, I think this book is, like, in my DNA now. This is maybe my fifth. It's my fifth. Maybe my Sixth reading of it. Just so, so personally significant.

A (25:41)

How tangly it is. I. My hometown is Lawrence, Kansas. So you were there. I was in New York in grad school at this time. This is my fifth reading as I understand it. I read it pretty soon after it was published. I probably read that James woods review in the New York Times. That was the time when James Wood or a Kakutani review in the New York Times with that kind of verbiage would make a book, if not as a seller instantly. Is certainly something that people would pay attention to. As a Protestant who grew up in Kansas and went on to study literature, this was an insta buy for me. As soon as I knew something about it, I knew Housekeeping was a big deal. I do not believe I had read Housekeeping before I read Gilead. I think I went back to read Housekeeping after. That's my memory there. This is also my fifth reading. A couple times over the course of my life I've done this and I told you about the book club there. And then you know, one of our. You haven't mentioned here that Gilead was in your wedding presentation program. Another way this is a constellation for us is that my mother performed your ceremony before we knew each other. So that is. Yes, you heard. If you hadn't heard that story from us before, that is a real thing that happened and it continues to blow our minds. So I'm sure it comes as a surprise to you all.

B (26:48)

We'll tell the details of that maybe in the office hours as well, how that happened. So that we are just. This is one of those deep points of connection and just a shared work for both of us. It's. It's. This is just an incredible book. And what a comeback for Marilynne Robinson. Housekeeping was 1989 and 25 years later she busts out with Gilead when people had probably stopped thinking about Marilynne Robinson. You know, like a 25 year gap between books is a really big. That's an entire generation of readers that wouldn't have known who she was. And to come out with this. And I think one of the greatest literary careers built on the smallest catalog of novels.

A (27:33)

You had this in the notes and I didn't have time to like sit with that because that is a fun game to think about. At the same time, probably Ralph Ellison is the only one that's going to beat because we get sort of one. Yeah, but that's a. That's a different conversation at all. Lawrence, Kansas, My hometown name checked in the book. The. The Specter of Lawrence and what Lawrence represents is important here, but also important to Lawrence itself. Basically founded by free soilers coming from Lawrence, Massachusetts is why Lawrence, Kansas got his name to vote. So that Lawrence would be a free state, would not have slavery. And that. That reality, those people populate. A lot of these, A lot of the. I guess the imaginative ancestry or the spiritual ancestry for Reverend Ames grandfather is this sort of John Brown like character who did some stuff as we're given John Brown like things during the. The border War as it was called between Missouri and Kansas and free slaves and slavers. And to this day that is in the water in Lawrence Kansas, the home of the University of Kansas, one of the high schools is called Free State. But there's very much a tradition of. And I want to connect this back to Iowa and the Iowa's writer workshop of these midway. These, these. Not. I want to. Oasis is not right. Not exactly the right way to put it. But there are these outposts, sanctuaries or, or universities, colleges in which these kinds of liberal humanity has been intentionally fostered and kindled in. In fanned over the years. And I think Robinson sees that to this day in some of these places. And it's not just about the places either. It's about where is in your own consciousness. Where do you kindle your own flames of humanity and consciousness and honesty with yourself and trying to do something good and big and small and meaningful all at the same time. So there is. She is picking up on something and reflecting something that is sort of the best version of. Of what I think of as where I come from. So I wanted to say something about that here at the same time.

B (29:44)

Beautiful.

A (29:45)

And that's what this is about. I think. Like it's all of these ideas kind of rolled up into one. You have all the big ideas. Exclamation point. Rebecca, that. That's pretty definitive and yet super general. So you want to say more about that?

B (29:55)

Yeah, I mean it's about faith and the nature of belief and the nature of doubt. It's about family. It's about community and duty and honor and war and race and the great mystery of life. Mystery is one of those words that comes up over and over and over in the text. The mystery of things, the mysteriousness of it, of beauty, of connection, of love, of religion. Also about aging and the passing of time and ring your great questions that literature asks Belle. Because it's also about the certainty of death.

A (30:27)

We're gonna need earplugs for the. The bells for our great Questions our

B (30:30)

dance section here, just incredible stuff. And as we were saying up top, it's fundamentally about how to live well and be a good person within all the tangly, complicated realities of family and community relationships. And I think from a coming from a background in the church, we can see how Rev. Ames aspires to and pretty successfully embodies the fruits of the spirit, the love, joy, peace, patience, those kinds of things. But again, these are human values about how to be in the world that are not exclusive to Christianity or to religion in general. And it makes the book like serious but not heavy, intellectual, but not hard. It's not a hard read.

A (31:17)

No.

B (31:18)

Concerned with spirituality and with the development of character, but not preachy. And it is unexpectedly funny.

A (31:25)

Yes.

B (31:25)

Especially if you have background in the church. Like there are some good little jokes if you have a church background, especially

A (31:31)

Protestant, let me say, sort of white person, Protestant churches. This is a. This is a land Robinson knows intimately, as do we later decades on. But some of the structures of feeling have not evolved a great deal.

B (31:46)

It seems to me kind of the very best of what the church can be, which to me personally is kind of a restorative, reparative experience to think about that. The characters here, and Ames especially, they're big hearted and open minded. He's really trying to make space for other people's experiences and for all that he might not understand about them.

A (32:08)

Yeah, certain judgment are not things that he or Robinson or this book are interested in. In fact, I find them inimical to the kinds of practices that they are interested in.

B (32:16)

And I really hesitate to use the word tender because I think the kids have kind of ruined it. But the book is really tender. There's a real like delicate love and appreciation for the people in Ames's life and this like quiet celebration of the small moments of beauty that make a life. I told you yesterday when we were doing a little prep that I want to have a moment here for Annie Dillard and especially for Mary Oliver. That and I think the works from these women must have also been present for Marilynne Robinson. Like Dillard writes, how we spend our days is how we spend our lives. And we're in. This book feels like that to me. A little account of day by day life that adds up to big capital L life and so much Mary Oliver. Attention is the beginning of devotion. The real prayers are not the words, but the attention that comes first. Pay attention, be astonished, tell about it. Ames is aware or trying to be aware of what he pays attention to and what deserves his attention and what he wants to pay attention to and all of that feels increasingly important as he's nearing the end of his life. But that, that really being tapped in to that humanist, naturalist appreciation.

A (33:31)

Yeah, it's in that Paris Review interview. The interviewer asked her like, you know, one thing Reverend Ames is seeing is like the beauty in the world. It's like, do you think the world is less beautiful now? And Robinson says, well, I think people will dwell on the ugliness in whatever era. I don't think it's any more beautiful than it was now. But you have to pay attention to different things. Like when Rembrandt's looking, watching, you know, painting a woman washing laundry at the moment, no one thought of that as a place to look for beauty.

B (34:04)

Right.

A (34:05)

But in doing so he opened up that as a, as sort of a space that would be available for beauty. And I think that's one thing she's interested in here. And Aims is, certainly is noticing those things that are around him in this frankly dying town. Right. Like this town is not doing great. It's, it's dry and people are going away to, you know, so many people have left. So much of about Ames and Jack, excuse me, Reverend Boughton is like they're coming to the end of their lives, but things have gone away from them. Families and friends and they're left by themselves. But even then, noticing that your five year old son enjoys putting a piece of hot dog on a string to go catting to get their cat back in from the yard, like that's a sacramental moment. Like that.

B (34:47)

Yes.

A (34:48)

The fireflies or the twinkle of the eye or you know, the moon that's low in the field. Like the great transformative moment here is he and his own father going to find his grandfather graves almost dying. But then like seeing the moon, Rebecca, that's the pinnacle. So where can you find, where can you sort of see through and past the superficial, the transient, the ugly, the banal to find these small moments? Because those are the moments. Those are not, those are not lesser than other things. Those are the things. Yes, Dillard. And that to Oliver. And I think that's something you and I really respond to.

B (35:27)

Yes, that there is a sacredness to life in the world, that there's a beauty to the natural world, especially into our connections with each other. And like I'm like a hippie liberal at this point in my life, you know, I'm pretty far from what Ames experience would have been. And yet there are so many commonalities you know, like, Mary Oliver is my personal religion, if I have one. But to feel that thread running through this work, I think it's the kind of way that many of us want to experience our lives. You don't want to miss the things that really matter. And it like to talk more about what it's like to read the book. It really, I think, rewards a slow and lingering reading. It's, as you said, only about 250 pages long. The audio edition is almost. Almost nine hours, which I think reflects a slow, thoughtful reading. I haven't listened to the audio, but I bet that's a great experience. You could kind of do like a little sermon every day almost if you wanted to. And he's so thoughtful. Ames is thoughtful and attentive and deliberate. And it just feels like an encounter with wisdom. A really special. A really special thing to find in a book and very rare.

A (36:46)

Yeah, I think of it as like you could rename this in your mind the Testament of Reverend Ames or the Gospel of Ames. Like it is its own. It is a entry into religious wisdom. That's what this book is. That's like Marilyn Robinson is a religious person because she cares about this. She believes in the value of having some relationship to religion. I think you can maybe imagine what we said, what versions of that that is and isn't at this point in this conversation. But he thinks of himself has. He's written, he does the math at one point of how many sermons he has up in the attic somewhere. But this is his last will and testament. This is. This is supposed to be the culmination and the distillation of what he has known and what he knows and how he has come to know it and what a remarkable work that is. And it's kind of one of those things where Robinson has to be able to do that for him to be able to do that. Right. And that is, I think, why there's such for us a admiration for Robinson. Because I don't know how you could fake this. Right. I don't know how you could be sort of a cynical pessimist atheist. Cormac McCarthy could not write this book. Right. For a lot of different reasons. But like. And it's so it feels true is not the word I want to use, but it feels authentic and lived in from a soul has lived these questions, have lived these thoughts.

B (38:16)

Comes from a real place.

A (38:17)

Yes. Comes from a reality.

B (38:18)

It comes from a true place for her. Like so much of what Ames is concerned with and what his family over generations have been Concerned with. Is war and peace and what is right with. Like, his grandfather caused this rift in their family because his grandfather was radically abolitionist, believed that slavery was wrong, but his approach to it was, I think, was quite violent. Quite violent. And this causes a rift in their family of like, no, we are pacifists. We don't believe in approaching, you know, disagreements in this way. The. There's a real like, like this is actually a consideration of what would Jesus do. That, that right runs through all of this. But from a personal moral perspective, rather than performative, preachy, controlling, this is a. Also a vision and aspiration for what the church can and should be. And Ames even has moments himself where he's reflecting on when his young wife, when they first met and she comes to the church and she wants to be baptized. He enlists some of the nicer older ladies to be around them while she's getting her instruction. But he, in the course of that, picks up on the fact that some of these ladies have picked up on ideas that are not his theology, not the theology he's been teaching them. They've been listening to radio preachers and like how quickly the work you've done in 40 years of preaching can be undone by a fire and brimstone kind of guy.

A (39:51)

Yeah.

B (39:51)

Out on the radio where he says, I want to tell them, like, this has nothing to do with the church. This has nothing to do with Jesus. This has nothing to do with what we are actually about. This, like this way of approaching fighting and this way of approaching war and this way of thinking about politics is not at all how we should be entering into things. And like, you can hear it in Robinson's conversations with Obama from 2016. You, you can come across that in a lot of her work. But I think there's also a grief then in her and in. In Ames for what the church has become largely in.

A (40:28)

Or.

B (40:28)

Or what, you know, certainly what, like Christian nationalism looks like today as a perversion of the real vision of the church.

A (40:35)

Yeah, I, you know that I, I think I mentioned this before, but she was, she has two sons and she talks about the voice came to her. Right. She didn't sit down to write Gilead. She, she. And again, I will say this unbelievable. I will say this about reading what authors say about things. There are no second sources that you can go to. An author tells you about how something came to be. Doesn't mean every author is lying. I assume most authors are telling us some version of the truth. But even if this is true, it's Interesting. But if it's a fabrication, it's even more interesting that this is how she say this can be. She was like at some kind of work related things. She was invited to speak. She'd booked multiple rooms so her sons could come join them. They didn't have families of their own yet. She's in a hotel by herself waiting for her sons to arrive during a Christmas trip. And this voice sort of comes to her. She's sitting alone at the window at a desk with what she called an Emily Dickinson light. And then what you can imagine, like the Bell of Amherst sitting up there and like writing with a quill pen or whatever. And then started writing this. So I don't know what that is and I don't know whether or not to believe it. But I think it's illuminative, both figuratively and metaphorically. Those are the same words, literally and metaphorically. To think about this space, her own headspace she was in thinking about her own sons, waiting for them. I wonder. This is a stray thought. What do you think Marilynne Robinson's relationship with her own sons is like?

B (41:59)

I don't want to know. I don't want to know anything about it.

A (42:02)

Oh, okay. All right. We're in denial. Sure. Relatable.

B (42:04)

I. I mean, I hope it's great. I assume it's as complicated as all family relationships are. And there's like the way that Ames writes to his son about what a gift his son's existence has been and what a blessing his son's life has been to him like that. There's a point where he's like, if I say anything in these pages, it's for you to know what a blessing you have been to our life and how wonderful it is just that you are here. I have to believe that as you were saying, like this is. It has to have been felt by Robinson before it can be felt by Ames, that these are the things she feels for her children. And I think these are the things,

A (42:39)

their arrival and waiting for them to arrive. She got into this place. But go ahead.

B (42:45)

I'm saying it's incredible to me that this book just sort of flows out that way because it feels like it must have had planning and scaffolding and structure. And maybe after she has this in initial encounter with the voice of Ames, where she starts, maybe she did step back to like give it more of that, but it just feels so natural.

A (43:04)

Well, it's interesting you said, because she says she doesn't plot or outline and the character is her highest and maybe only priority and everything flows out of that. But I do want to mention that there are four elements that kind of put us in. I call it put us in the tent. This is something I used to use in teaching, where the tent being where does someone encounter their own consciousness and consider it? This goes back to book nine of the Iliad, when Achilles has decamped to his tent because, like he does, he no longer believes in the moral political system in which he's participating. Right. Because of Agamemnon and the code and whatever he's like, I'm opting out. I'm in this tent. And in the tent, three emissaries come to him, and he's trying to figure out what he believes and what he thinks. So I think of this as. How does Reverend Ames get in this particular tent? Well, first of all, he's been a preacher his whole life, so that's those. The ideas of the divine and good and evil and eternity are all out there. But structurally, Robinson has put some pieces on the board that heighten this and give us some. Gives us some catalysts. First of all, his heart diagnosis, because I think it's different if he's just old. Right.

B (44:09)

There's, like, a little more urgency now.

A (44:10)

Yeah, there's a little, like, if you're 77, in good health, it could be whenever. But he has a real sense that it could be any day. Right. Rebecca, is that your sense of that? Like, he could die in the night, at any rate?

B (44:21)

Yeah. And I mean, the medicine's different in the 50s, so they're like, don't walk up and down the stairs. Don't stand up too fast. Kind of just take it easy. He's also got more time to write now because he can't be up and about doing as many of those things, but.

A (44:33)

Right.

B (44:33)

It does. Yeah. It does seem to me that there's more urgency that he's like, now is the time. I should start this.

A (44:38)

And people get reflective, understandably, when it comes to end of life. There's that, and then there's this unexpected gift of his relationship with Lila. So he had been married before. Before had a daughter and a wife that died young. And of course, that's a huge sadness to him. And his expectation was he was going to be alone, living this sort of sadly monastic life forever, until Lila walks into the church one day. It's quite beautiful and moving. And that. That's a theme that's presented for the rest. And then that leads to. But that's important, but also leads that his son is so young, she's so much younger than him. Good job. Ames family reproductive organs. Because that's a. That's an achievement there. But the fact that his young is so young. And I want to put a pin in that for a second. And then the return of Jack Boughton, return of Reverend Boughten's prodigal son, which is explicitly. That's not us doing reading like he's called the son over and over again at the same time. So that his song. He cannot as a man, as an adult, communicate. His son cannot understand what he would have to say to him even if he were to say it out loud. And then Jack Boughton represents sort of a. I don't know, a negative exemplar how things could go. Maybe what he's concerned that his son could be. And so what is the purpose of this document is something I think about a lot when I read this. Right. He wants to be known to his son. A. Is that possible? Aren't words grand that it's even possible that we can do this over space and time? But what, imagine. What effect would he imagine this document would have on us? And what. What would it do to any of us to feel like we had a real sort of bone deep understanding of the important people are in life and how rare that is?

B (46:16)

Yeah.

A (46:16)

And he has a real desire to like transmit, to contain, to pass on what he's experienced. But he's what he's learned. And I don't think the book works. Rebecca. If he's 18, if, if his son is 18.

B (46:31)

I agree.

A (46:32)

It matters that he's a kid, so he's there. But he has to create this sort of intellectual soul time capsule to pass on to him because he's not gonna be able to handle it for another two decades.

B (46:42)

Yeah. That. It's like it's real moral instruction. The book ends with Ames saying like, I pray that you become what, like a good man in a brave country. A brave man. A brave man in a brave country. I pray you will find a way to be useful. And I think that that's what the preceding 250 pages are attempting to do. Here's how I attempted to be a brave man and to support our country in being brave. Here. Here's how I attempted to be useful. The word useful comes up a lot as well. This really matters to Ames.

A (47:14)

To be Midwestern shit going on.

B (47:16)

Right. To be useful, to be of service and that he's wanting to provide. It's the. He's writing his begats here's where your family came from. Here's what my history. But also to provide moral instruction. And the. These are actually really the kinds of stories that your parents are not super likely to tell you while they're alive. Even when you're old enough. It's so deeply personal. And he gets really into things that have caused him great pain. The things that caused him shame. There's something about putting pen on paper and the intimacy and maybe privacy of journaling that allows him to say things to this imagined future grown up version of his son.

A (48:00)

That's an interesting point. Like there's multiple things. Allow him some distance so that he can be brave without having to say it to his face.

B (48:07)

Yeah.

A (48:07)

And that it contrasts so beautifully with these multiple failed attempts to have a conversation with Jack Botton. Right. There's like.

B (48:15)

Right.

A (48:15)

It's almost like biblical. It gets to come to him three times to have this conversation about what's really going on. And Jack's wryness and world weariness I think foreclose some of their connection. They. They ultimately end up in an interesting place. But they don't connect in a way that I think Reverend Ames imagines him being able to connect with his own son. Part of the thing I think that's sustaining him has this dream of his son picking up this document someday and like sort of his interior flowing into him and being seen and being understood. And who doesn't want to do that? Like that's something that really struck me this time is like what a. Even though it doesn't happen, the idea that it could happen is a kind of afterlife. For Reverend Ames. It is a kind of catharsis about if my son can see and know me, then it will not have all been nut for naught. It just won't be. It just won't have all been for not if that's a possibility. I don't even know didn't. I don't even need to know that it happened. I just need to know that it's

B (49:12)

possible that it could. And that I left this here.

A (49:15)

Yes.

B (49:15)

For him.

A (49:16)

And I made it and I made an effort and I really tried.

B (49:19)

Yeah. Boy, does this book hit differently in midlife than it hit when I was 24. And like, you know, I noticed that many of the passages I marked in this new copy for this reading were the same when I was flipping through my old copy. So there's stuff that feels consistent that snags my attention every time. But I have to assume that both that will be true as I Continue to revisit this book over the next decades of my life, which I will. I think this will continue to be one of my most reread, few and most reread books.

A (49:50)

Yeah.

B (49:51)

And what must it be like to read this later in your Life? Robinson is 82 now. How is it for her to think about this? You know, this was. She was early in her, like, you know, early senior years, like 60s when this came out. Late 50s, maybe, that it's the reality that you will die, but also the reality that your parents will or have died. There's so much longing to know and to be known here.

A (50:19)

He even talks. Reverend Ames writes about the performative nature. Like he's aware of us being aware. And by really his son being aware. Like, that's a fun thing to think about. Like, this is a work of fiction, but we're reading it. So we are in the place of Reverend Ames's son. We are replacement son for this being that does not exist. But he's even aware of the performative nature of it. And he even makes that into. I think he says. I think Calvin says this, I think is what Robinson is quoting. Ames is thinking about is how. How much God might enjoy us like that. You know, think of God as watching us live our lives. And much like Ames is watching his own son's little dramas, right? His own little encounters and playing and how much we are to Ames as humanity is to the divine is a very cool idea to think about here. But even that regard, Ames is performing for us his own awareness and trying to give us some grace and what we might be able to understand at the same time. It really makes me think. I mean, I didn't know this about Robinson, that she was a Shakespeare head. I should have figured this out. But all the world's the stage. I mean, come on, it's just all there all the time. But how this, the performance of grace and grace are maybe the same thing. So that's one I had too. And this is what this is verging into. Stray thoughts, I think.

B (51:38)

Yes.

A (51:40)

Knowing someone, like really knowing them and understanding them are two different things. They're related, but they are different things. And I think one thing Ames has come to understand, I think most people come to understand, is that you can know someone, not understand them, and you can understand someone and not know them. And this is particularly true of close family members. And I think it's particularly true of children because you grow up and you know your parents probably better than anyone else knows them, how they act what they're like, what motivates them, but you have no understanding of them. Right. And then as the adult, you can understand people. It's quite easy to understand a lot of people quickly, but knowing them is the work of a lifetime. And I think that distinction is something that kept coming back to me over. He's can't. And in this document, can the Reverend Ames give his son and us enough to do both?

B (52:35)

Yeah.

A (52:35)

And I don't know the answer to that. I don't know the answer to that question.

B (52:37)

And then it really comes down to, like, how brave and willing is he to see his himself and to understand himself before it goes onto the page. There's so much just like, pursuit of self awareness here and a willingness to take an inventory of what your life has been and to then share what you find, warts and all, with someone else. It's really quite courageous.

A (53:00)

It is courageous, except that he's sort of putting. He's bearing it. And he's not gonna have to be around for the reading of the will.

B (53:05)

Right.

A (53:05)

Right. I mean, that's. Which is maybe okay. I mean, maybe that's all you can do. You can find the courage that you need. We're gonna ver. We've verged already into stray thoughts here. Rebecca, what occurred to you in addition to our more formal, like, just about every page?

B (53:21)

I just thought, this is exactly what I want reading to feel like. This is exactly what I want reading to do. This is an experience with capital A art, the way that I think capital A art shows up best. It's just incredible stuff.

A (53:37)

Yeah.

B (53:37)

And that's the big headline. I think that, like, my church background came in a lot as I was reading, and maybe this round of reading it more because I knew I was preparing for the show. But, like, I feel like eight is what people have in mind when they talk about a Protestant work ethic or when there's, like, a gauzy nostalgia around a Protestant work ethic, that it's that desire to be useful, a willingness to be of service to people. And some. Like the pray without ceasing language that comes up in Christian circles is really intended to be like. Every act that you perform is part of how you live your faith, and Ames certainly is doing that.

A (54:20)

Funny you have this note here because I had this experience. I read it slowly, actually more slow than I do for a lot of these episodes, and I found myself having existential whiplash when I pick up my phone. Like, it felt so dumb to check out the news.

B (54:34)

Yeah.

A (54:35)

Like there's important things happening in the world. And I'm going to talk a little bit about Ames is cloistered in a way he is away from the things of the world and not engage with the big doings. And there's some of that I think that is hard to live with and I think that was an internal struggle with the Ames family of how much to be involved in the comings and goings of the world to put your body on the line to vote to make decisions about governance and other things like this. But one thing it certainly does is help you strip away the things you maybe don't really care about that distract you that get in the way of some other of ongoing encounter with your own life. I think I love your word cloud. I don't think you can do this. I don't think I can. I'd love to be able to do this in Apple books or Kindle or whatever my digital experience is and be like what are the 12 most frequently cited words or synonyms of or kinds of words going on here?

B (55:24)

Yeah I was thinking a word cloud for this book would be fascinating because he mystery comes up loneliness, blessing, understand, love, wonder, beauty. And these words are repeated over and over and over. It's clearly intentional on Robinson's part. It feels purposeful and it feels right. This violates all the fiction rules about don't say the same thing over and over this very purposeful well executed repetition. But just this tells us what she is concerned with. The mystery of life and of belief the sort of fundamentally lonely nature of being a person and what it is to bless and to be blessed. What you were just saying about the limits of understanding other people. What really does love look like and the experience of both wonder and wondering.

A (56:14)

Yeah I I think the reckons the reckoning with the imperfect ability of life our own limitations our own sin or wrong action or and sadness and brokenness of the world is what prevents a work like this and I throw Dillard and Oliver in there that prevents it from becoming a book version of a lift live laugh love pillow or eat pray love even those are even that book is born out of a certain brokenness at the same time but there is a facile version of hug every day that you could take from that. One might be tempted to think what's going on here but that is not this. It is comes out of a appreciation for sadness appreciation for brokenness an understanding of the insufficiency of our own understanding and relationship to each other. But and yet and yet look what still could be possible.

B (57:07)

Yeah, there's a Mary Oliver poem called When Death Comes Shocks.

A (57:10)

I know that's a shock. There's a Mary.

B (57:12)

One of my favorites. And one of the lines is I do not want to end up simply having visited the world. And I think I felt that all over this book that Ames is looking for the ways the world has shaped him and also for the impact that he's had on this small world around him, that he doesn't want it to have been just a casual encounter there. Another stray thought. And also just both geography and timing are really significant to this book. It's 1956. At the end of the book, it turns out that the big thing thing that's gone on with Jack Boughton, that he's the secret he's been carrying, that he's been trying to find a way to like talk to Ames about, maybe to confess to Ames, is that Jack has fallen in love, he's married a black woman, they have a child together, and they have not found a way to make a life together because of anti miscegenation laws that are so prevalent. They've been living in St. Louis. That choice of geography is really important. Like St. Louis, famously one of the most segregated cities in the country. It still is a very racially complex, difficult place to be. But really in 1956, that's 11 years before Loving vs. Virginia would legalize interracial marriage. So just that timing and place that Robinson chooses to have them living or to have them having tried to live in the context of also this family story. These families whose legacies are tied up with abolition, with trying to fight for freedom for a life that is welcoming to people of all races. But they also live in the middle of nowhere in a small town in Iowa that hasn't had a black church in decades because the old one burned down. Not from anything malicious, but the old one burned down and the black people moved somewhere where they felt safer.

A (59:03)

I had more of a sense that maybe it was not so innocent. I think that like there there's a possibility that someone did it on purpose. Like it wasn't like a burning cross and Klansman situation. But the black church burns down in America. I think you could do worse than to default to someone meant for that to happen in that situation. I'll go a little step further. I have this down as Robinson's doing something very cagey around race in this book. I mean, the Jack, Della and his son are the most avert examples. But we do get that church fire And I think the placing this in 1955 into 1956 because I think it. He has a birthday. So it's over the years. Rosa Parks is 1955. The, the civil Rights movement is in the paper that Reverend Ames would be reading. And I think it's a real challenge to his settled worldview because he's got his grandfather's Civil War anti slavery activism on one side in the rear view mirror and in his windshield is this coming civil rights movement that is peaceful. Right. How is he going to engage? Is that a challenge to him? I think there's maybe Robinson is doing something interesting about showing the limitations of Ames's global embedded political intra human perspective. Because he sat out World War I, he sat out the Civil War, he set out World War II. But this on a moral level, it would be difficult for him to sit with this one out morally at this moment.

B (60:37)

I love this point. And it connects to near the end of the book he's reflecting on maybe allowing himself to admit that it's not just that he has stayed in Gilead because he loves the smallness of the place, but also that he had been afraid of the bigness of the world outside. And there's a lot to recommend an intentionally small life. But he comes around to almost admitting that he knows he's missed out on some things because of his fear and his anxiety. And I think you're onto something there with that reading that he may be. He knows that he's not going to live long enough to engage with that like the civil rights fight. But that, that's a question that's coming for his wife, for his son, for his church.

A (61:25)

Yeah. Is that that brave that he wants for his son? Is that the brave he wants for his own country is to. To engage with the Civil rights movement and what that might mean at the same time. You know, to quote one of the other great texts, you've got mail, when Meg Ryan says, I, I have a small life and I like it, but have I left it because I haven't I like it or because I haven't been brave? And I think the answer could be both.

B (61:43)

Both. Yeah.

A (61:44)

But the stop the smell of roses thing is both fair, understandable and beautiful. But also there are other things in the world than roses. And how. And how do you come to that? So that's something that hit me over and over again. Let's see. Gilead. So we're in straight thoughts. This is verging into little miscellaneous. But in Hebrew Gilead means the stones of Testimony Which I don't. Come on. Geez Louise.

B (62:12)

Also, the name of a place like Will there be a balm in Gilead? Is in a Bible verse. And it's like this place near Eden, like Fertile Crescent, that up in Jordan

A (62:21)

somewhere that felt close enough to be real, but in, in the times of the biblical times, like also kind of far away. Will his son actually value this story? We, I think we talked in the big the Book Riot podcast a while ago about these like ghost writing services where you can write your memoir like your memoir. There's this real desire when people are older to self publish their memoir, tell their story or do something else, or to inherit the family's furniture. Like I think this is also a version of the same story to pass on something most of the time in my experience that falls on that is often received as less valuable and urgent than the person wanting to pass those things on comes to be. So that's one of the great questions to me of this book.

B (63:03)

I don't think it matters. Like I think the exercise of this is mostly for Ames to spend this time thinking about his life so that he can reckon with the fact of his upcoming death, the fact that his wife and child will live all this time without him. And it's transformative for him. Like one of in favorite quotes. One of my favorite quotes from this and one of the top ones on the Internet is love is holy because it is like grace. The worthiness of its object is never really what matters. That loving someone, extending someone grace. These are transformative acts and they transform us first. Whether or not they transform the person that we love is out of our control. But to live in that way transforms us. And I think that this act of writing all of this down is transformative for Ames.

A (63:53)

I'm surprised that Robinson's a Congregationalist and not a Methodist because I grew up a Methodist and the concept of grace from John Wesley, it's like that is the thing this unmerited, unwarranted, you know, man is justified. You don't justify with. You're justified by grace. Like it's just given to you. You don't deserve it, you're a sinner, whatever. I am less versed in what makes a Congregationalist a congregationist. Maybe they have that baked into the pie and they get some other stuff too. But that's something that I was thinking about as you, as you wrote grace down. I mentioned the know his John Brown like father being an indictment possibly of Ames quiet life. I talked about Robinson being cagey and Clever and circumspect about race, kind of leaving a breadcrumb that I was interested in following. I, I saw like a, a spectrum here where there's Edward the atheist, right. Who's Ames brother who is estranged and has some kind of reconciliation but he still is like living down on the coast with his, his, his heathen academic family. Relatable by the way. To live on the coast with your heathen academic family, by the way.

B (64:51)

Yes, we know that feeling.

A (64:53)

Yep, yep. And then Reverend Ames himself kind of in the middle like a kind of Goldilocks where he's, he's taken some things, he's serving the church, he's tried to live a good life of contemplation and service. And then Jack Boughton on the end who's desultory and ego driven and subject to impulse and sort of dysregulated I guess to use modern psychological language, but who's sort of come around a little bit. He's trying to be a good man, trying to get. And the, the most tense confrontation is when Jack Boughton is asking his father and Reverend Ames about can you change? Yeah, this, I thought this was so beautiful because they thought, they, they initially think he's mocking them. Right Rebecca? Or like he's not taking this seriously. He's going to be the mischief maker, the imp that he's been. But he's really trying to get a sense from them. Do you think it's possible for me to be other than I have been? And their answer is not helpful to him because they're worried.

B (65:47)

I'm so glad you brought that up because that anxiety that Ames and Boughten have about their interactions with Jack is so well presented on the page. There's decades of family history here. This person was a troublemaker as a kid. He's kind of a smartass. He's really smart and he's able to use, use that intellect in a way that can be sharp and unpleasant and mean to people. And so in every conversation Reverend Ames like wants to get it right but is also afraid of the possibility that Jack is mocking him or trying to make him look foolish. And it's, that's, that kind of anxiety built out of these past experiences makes it really hard to engage in a way that is genuine and open and to have a productive conversation that they want to have with, with each other and feel so true especially to parent child relationships that like, I think most of us have had the feeling of like, oh, you're talking to me as the person I was When I was a kid, not as this adult or like the language that we use in my house is like, I've molted. Like that's. You're addressing a past version of me, which reasonable. You had experience with that past version. But something, something has changed here. And it takes a while for Reverend Ames to grok that that something is going on with Jack Bond that has made him desire a real conversation about, like, the state of his soul and what his duties are as a person and as a man. And that Ames has got to take some time to believe it before he can meet him there.

A (67:20)

Yeah, I have in all caps here, Beware, oh reader, of being seduced by feeling like you are closer to a character because you are reading their diary, letter or journal. Let me remind you that any author, should they choose, could give you close third person omniscient narration. When they are not doing that, they are doing something else. And that something else has different uses and abuses. Abuse is not right. It has other consequence. But you can feel like you're getting the straight dope from someone if you're reading their diary. But I would just encourage you to think about any diary or journaling you've owned on and how difficult, nigh impossible it is is not to think about an imagined reader. Right. So I always urge people to think of this. This is actually a step further away from a direct relation of consciousness than could be done in a fictive universe. There's a version of this where we're getting, you know, Marilyn Robinson plugs us right into the matrix of Reverend Ames. We get his unfiltered experience and thinking that is not what we get. We get something else. So just any the correspondent by Virginia Evans or whatever, you're going into the Diary of Anne Frank, any of these famous things with our history, letters, whatever, just remember you are further away than could be done. And beware, oh, beware of mistaking that.

B (68:42)

Great note.

A (68:42)

Stray thought. What would your own testimony be like with the podcast? Isn't long enough for this. This is built for the listener and the reader. It, it feels, in the reading of it, it feels humble and beautiful. And I think in that humility and beauty, it seems less difficult than it actually would be to do something like this.

B (69:07)

I agree. It's a really difficult thing that he's doing.

A (69:10)

Very difficult thing to do. And then the end. Does he die or is he just done?

B (69:14)

Don't care.

A (69:15)

You don't care. Okay, fair enough.

B (69:16)

I mean, I read it as he was just done, but he's Gonna die at some point.

A (69:20)

Yeah. The last line is I, I pray and then I sleep. Something like that. Some version of that.

B (69:25)

Beautiful.

A (69:26)

Okay, quote time. I have 82 like two paragraph quotes, so I didn't even pick stuff out for this one. Rebecca, you go. And then I'm just sort of like randomly pick some stuff, I guess in a minute.

B (69:36)

Truly there is something underline worthy on almost every page. This, like pound for pound is so, so good. The number one quote on Goodreads, which I'm on board with the Goodreads selection this time. This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it. Three and a half times as popular as the next most popular quote on Goodreads. People really like that one. That again, resonates with all the Mary Oliver and Annie Dillard of it. Existence seems to me now the most remarkable thing that ever could be imagined. Another. It is still all new to me. I've lived my life on the prairie and a line of oak trees can still astonish me. One lapse of judgment can quickly create a situation in which only foolish choices are possible.

A (70:19)

That long horse story.

B (70:20)

Yes. This great story where there's like two buildings built on opposite sides of a road and they're trying to like. Everyone's obsessed with making tunnels because it's also during abolition when this story happens. So a tunnel has been made under this road and then there's a big storm and it caves in. And like a stranger riding his horse through the town. The horse, like the horse is what causes it to cave.

A (70:48)

It built essentially a sinkhole in the middle of the road.

B (70:51)

The horse gets stuck and the people just pick up one of the buildings and move it and place it over the hole. Horse in that hole in the ground for a couple days until they can like get him out. And then ultimately they can't repair the road because the tunnel is so deep, the sinkhole is so deep. So they just move the main street and all of the buildings like a mile away. And Ames spends time telling us this, kind of telling his son this all to get to the point of like, think through what you're doing. Or.

A (71:22)

Or I mean, I think about it this way too. Maybe if you see someone doing something that seems foolish, you're only seeing like the 12th dominant.

B (71:32)

Yeah.

A (71:33)

You know, all behaviors explicable with enough information is a real. It's a real one for that kind of a situation.

B (71:40)

Some more just great stuff. There is no justice in love, no proportion in it. And there need not be because in any Specific instance, it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is in the eternal breaking in on the temporal. So how could it subordinate itself to cause or consequence? But yeah, the. Because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing incomprehensible reality. Like just come on, like I want to shout amen at that.

A (72:12)

I have one that's related. If I can just jump in here. Yeah, that if you're. He's trying to explain how he understood. Like this is a specific example. It's like imagine Soapy. Soapy being their cat.

B (72:21)

Yeah.

A (72:21)

So Soapy is living in the world, right? And can get the milk and find the hot dog on the string that his son is trying to do and spend some time in the sunshine and go along with their felines concerns. But the world embraces and exceeds Soapy's understanding of it. Soapy might be a victim of ideological conflict right along with the rest of us if things get out of hand. She would make some, no doubt some feline appraisal of the situation. But like the wor we are, we are more advanced in our understanding than a cat's for sure. But still the world exists in excess of our understanding. It not unlike Soapy's understanding of the world. So imagine a secondary consciousness or a secondary or tertiary really understanding of the world which would analogize our understanding to be as limited as Soapy's. And that is the purview of the divine, that is the purview of religion, that is the purview of thinking about how to understand the continuity of being, that acknowledges that we know a lot and yet we don't know everything. And there could be a step change of understanding between what we now currently understand and what could be possible and how the world and the universe is actually constructed.

B (73:30)

And that like the connection of sort of the wonder and sense of awe at the world and the humility that it inspires runs, I mean, all over this.

A (73:41)

Yeah. Marilyn Robinson hates Richard Dawkins because he's an atheist, but because of his certainty. Right?

B (73:46)

Yes. Yeah.

A (73:47)

And that, that, sir, that, that, that smug certainty that you have got it all figured out by saying there can be no possibility of a Soapy plus us plus this third thing really chaps Marilyn Robinson's eyes.

B (74:00)

Yeah, this is one of my stray thoughts. But like reading it this time and having worked together for as long as we have now, it seems inevitable to me that the two of us were going to love this book with your running goal of being the most reasonable man on earth. Like everybody slow down. Let's not get certain yet. And my like, I have a thoroughgoing concern about, like what is humane and to treat people well. We share that. But like this, I was just like, oh, of course. This book is like factory made for the two of us. More Great Quotes. It was that night. There's this night that he reflects on where he and Boughten were sitting and just like a field is full of fireflies. Like in a way that none of us have seen in the year 2026 because of climate change. But he says it was that night as if the earth were smoldering. Well, it was and it is. An old fire will make a dark husk for itself and settle in on its core, as in the case of this planet. I believe the same metaphor may describe the human individual as well, perhaps Gilead, perhaps civilization. Prod a little and the sparks will fly.

A (75:06)

Yeah, I'll do a couple funny ones before I do my other ones. There should be a lot to prevent Recipes for molded salad within 20 pages of any article having to do with religion. On one page is a recipe for that molded salad of orange gelatin with stuffed green olives and shredded cabbage and anchovies as a dogged my ministrial life these last years. People don't believe me when I tell you that one of the hotbeds of innovation in the 20th century was church potlucks and the invention of packaged gelatin. Because the Methodists and the Presbos were out there doing things that the the mortal mind cannot comprehend when it comes to jello science.

B (75:43)

I am so glad you pulled this quote, because that moment where like word has gotten out that maybe he's not doing well. He's like he's had a spell of something and all the church ladies have brought casseroles and he can guess which lady made which casserole.

A (75:58)

Right?

B (76:00)

Like who visited based on which casserole. It is so good.

A (76:04)

Jack Boughton is a piece of work. A piece of work is the opposite of bless your heart. In the upper Midwest, a piece of work might be the worst thing you could say about someone and polite society at the same time. I've always loved to baptize people, though I've sometimes wished there were more shimmer and splash in the way we go about it. Well, but you two are dancing around in your iridescent little downpour, whooping and stomping as sane people ought to do when they encounter a thing so miraculous as water,

B (76:36)

so good.

A (76:37)

And internally the world will be. Troy, I believe, believe. And all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe. The ballad they sing in the streets. Troy, if you don't know, is the. The is the Iliad. That's the. That's what's going on there.

B (76:52)

One of my funnier ones, Ames is thinking about how, like, if someone does wrong to him, he can tolerate it, but if somebody were to do something wrong to his son, he wouldn't figure he wouldn't be able to figure out what to do. But he says he could knock me down the stairs. Stairs. And I would have worked out the theology for forgiving him before I reached the bottom.

A (77:10)

Yes. Yeah, I thought the bit about the. The Spanish flu of 1918 was really prescient. It felt very familiar. Right. I preached with a scarf around my mouth for more than a year. Everybody smelled like onions because the word went around that flu gyms were killed by onions. People rub themselves down. That was the inver. Onions were the invermectin of the. The Spanish flu of 1918. Really wild to see that.

B (77:36)

Well, and he even, like Ames, has some. To my 2026 reading, like questionable theology around the flu that he's like, there's the flu as the plague and then there's the war when everyone goes and dies. And he's like, the plague was a warning to us about all of these wars and this violence and we. We continue to send our young men off to die and God. God is going to continue to punish us. And that was. That's like what my. One of my few departures from agreeing with his general approach to things through the text.

A (78:08)

Yes. Yeah.

B (78:08)

Yeah.

A (78:09)

How about this? Playing baseball in Iowa as the sun sets. Remind you of anything? You played catch in the evenings after supper for years to the sun. The sun went down and it was too dark for us to see the ball. I think he just appreciated having a child at home, a son. Well, I was a fine, vigorous old man too, until recently.

B (78:27)

Hey, dad, want to have a catch?

A (78:29)

Oh, boy. Ah, life. Ah, this world. That's also a quote. Also just a sentence. Robinson, when she puts her mind to it. I saw a bubble flow past my window, fat and wobbly and ripening toward that dragonfly blue that they turned just before they burst.

B (78:47)

Yeah, I remember that one.

A (78:49)

And a man can know his father or his son, and there might be still nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual in comprehension.

B (78:59)

Wherever you turn your eyes, the world can shine like transfiguration you don't have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see only who can have the courage to see it

A (79:11)

in his. Talking about his own father. I know for a fact I disappointed him. Oh, baby.

B (79:17)

And just. Just a taste. This is more quotes than we usually read. Like, this is just a taste of what awaits you.

A (79:24)

Yeah, we better move on. We'll save some more for the. The office hours here. Rebecca, is this for you? I mean, not for you.

B (79:32)

Yeah, I mean it's for me. Get your Kleenex. I cried reading the ending of it last night. It's for you if you want to sit with the big questions. If writing is more important to you than plot. And I think you get bonus. It's for you if you have connection to or affection for the Midwest and. Or you grew up in the church. None of those things are prerequisites for appreciating this book and getting a lot out of it. But you will. There will be extra layers of knowing.

A (80:02)

Yeah, I think you're right. Here you have. If religion is a total non starter. There are people that have experience of religion that would foreclose them wanting to be generous towards the idea of an organized relations being a place of generative possibility. This is for the somebody somewhere heads like you think, you know, like there's some. There can be something there, but it's a version of it. And the. The dogma is not the thing, but there's something outside of the dogma. And then you. As you say, if you need things to happen, if you. If you're a plot reader, that's not going to be a great fun time. Here the immortal questions are asked. I mean seriously, which of these is it not about? What is the good life? What do I owe my neighbor? How do I know what I know? Is this all there is? How to deal with the certainty of death? What else might there be? What's the deal with good and evil? Free will rear. No. How did we get here? Who am I? Good gravy. I mean, stop all the clocks. Rebecca. We have. We have a new winner for.

B (80:59)

I think there's. Yeah, I think there's really a way of looking at these questions that are a math here of like the best works are the ones that take on the most of these at the highest levels. And that's what makes Gilead so wonderful is Robinson is doing all of this. And like there's, you know, I pulled a few quotes to look at like, you know, what do I owe my neighbor? What's the deal with good and evil at the root of real honor is always the sense of the sacredness of the person who is its object. That's how you know what you owe your neighbor is you start with the idea belief that that person is sacred. And how do I know what I know? You never do know that. Actual nature, even of your own experience. Thank you, Reverend Ames.

A (81:43)

Is this all there is? Maybe, maybe not.

B (81:46)

Right. But he's. I mean, Ames is writing from a. An assumption that there is an afterlife where.

A (81:52)

Yeah. Yeah. Reverend Botton is like, I just think of heaven as this times two. Very, very like college bowl session version of and AM's. Like, oh my God, if it's time two, I'm not gonna be able to handle that because this is so amazing.

B (82:03)

It's kind of lovely. It's about all of these. She's doing everything here. Just truly a master.

A (82:09)

I don't. I guess. Which. Maybe if we spin it a little different. Which of these is Ames the most unsure of or does he wrestle with. With the most? I think I guess to. I'll float this. My. My. My opening bet will be this. What do I know? Owe my neighbor. Especially when it comes to Jack Botton, who has caused someone he cares about immeasurable pain. Even then I've got it. And the answer he gets to is yes. But even he's a kid and even.

B (82:47)

Even then and tied up in that is the what's the deal with good and evil? Like, is this man a bad man? How bad is he? Do I need to warn my wife about him when I'm gone? Like, what has he done? And then he gets around to a place of really pretty radical empathy. Like, we haven't talked about empathy yet. But Robinson and Ishiguro are up there in the pantheon of authors who I don't think you can teach empathy, but you can model it. And their characters do model. Like, this person has done bad things. What might be going on underneath that? How did they arrive there? And Ames puts himself through the paces of. There's more going on with Jack Boughton than I'm aware of. Trying to be open. Open enough to get Boughton to tell him what it is so that they can meet each other and try to come to some understanding. And then when it's revealed, he comes to see like, this is. This person has gone through so much and he's trying now to be good. I can't conceive of him as evil. And like the. I mean the big final scene is that he Blesses him and blesses him as not just a. He says like you know, this child of yours, this son and brother, but also this husband and father which is a way that no one else has seen.

A (84:03)

Yes, Jack, they don't know. His family doesn't know he has. He's taken on those titles.

B (84:08)

That's what I just had like slow tears dripping down my face like it's so powerful.

A (84:13)

And our understanding of that is like he really is afraid he's going to be rebuked by glory and his father. Like he really thinks they're going to never because that it'll kill his father. There is a. How am I going to put this that doesn't throw shade at. To me there is a version of this book in which Jack in this. And I don't want to spoil what happens in other volumes at the end of this book Jack and Della and their kids sort of move in and everything's cool. But that is not what this book is dealing with because the book itself is trying to say the world is broken. You know, the poor will be with always. There are things that are unreconcilable in our own lives. And then how do you behave? And then what do you do? And Reverend Ames keeps the secret but also blesses Jack and that his, his. That's his way of navigating that reality. Is there some braver version of Reverend Ames that confronts Reverend Boughton and says you've got this kid. Wake up you dumb old man. You don't realize what you have in front of you. Don't make the mist. Do not take for granted what you have because I've got a son who's never going to know me. You have your son right there for all of his flaws. Just open your arms baby. But he doesn't do that. He does this middle thing which is beautiful and lovely but I can't help thinking that there's this other version that would have been braver yet and that I hope for you to be brave is an acknowledgment that maybe Ames signal flaw is a lack of bravery of a kind. Anyway, let's see. Are we sure this on about art?

B (85:39)

I will let Reverend Ames answer this for himself. Quote for me writing has always felt like praying sermon.

A (85:46)

There's close reading of scripture. It's all. All the reading and writing piles of old sermons.

B (85:51)

Yeah, everything's here.

A (85:52)

Could you get the most of the gist of this from watching the signal adaptation? This is one of the most wonderful version questions of this because we have this knowledge that Martin Scorsese has the right. Scorsese himself especially has gotten older, has gotten more and more interested in religion. You can understand why this book would be interesting to Martin Scorsese, an artist at the end of his life, looking back and trying to figure out what's going to happen. I don't know how you do this because would it all be voiceover? Like, I really don't know because the central pleasures of this are Ames thinking on paper and Scorsese is one of the best to ever do it. So I. I'm not suggesting that there isn't a way. I just haven't thought of it. But I find this very difficult to imagine as being awesome.

B (86:36)

Yeah, I mean, I think you could get a. Like there are enough little beautiful scenes to be set pieces where you could hear him narrating and then drop into the scene with them and it's a

A (86:48)

River Runs Through It. It would be some River Runs through it.

B (86:52)

I'm. I don't know all the feel. I'm so excited. I'm so scared about the Martin Scorsese version. If someone does it, I want it. I'm currently thinking about Clint Bentley and the Train Dreams team. Like Train Dreams. I haven't read the book, but I think the film is like meaningfully different in some ways. But the vibe of the Train Dreams film is kind of like the feeling that I would want to have watching Gilead the Past.

A (87:17)

I would love to see Scorsese shoot Kansas in Iowa to make it look as beautiful as it really. I mean, maybe that's all I need from something like this is to do Scorsese Field of Dreams. Wheat, corn, scorched earth, Old little town with a steeple and a little kid playing in the gloaming. But I find it difficult to think about a film translating, adapting the interiority that is the spinning molten core of this book onto. It's just not. This is a book thing. This does things that book do. And a film would have to do things that films do. And sometimes the lack is why both of them are good.

B (87:57)

It's hard to imagine. Certainly if Scorsese does this while he's alive, we will see it and we will be nervous.

A (88:04)

Yeah. I was thinking about movie, musical, TV series or Muppets. I'll let you do your second. I was thinking, is there a one act that is just like you take the Ames and Jack scenes and you make it into a one act?

B (88:20)

That would be wonderful. Yeah.

A (88:22)

Yeah, you can do that.

B (88:24)

I mean, my Joke is it's a three hour musical but the only song is Landslide. Just like Endless Verses of Land jukebox

A (88:31)

musical with of Neil Young songs.

B (88:35)

Just. I was like, I just had, you know, like probably a Fleetwood Mac playlist or something going while I was making my notes on this and Landslide came on and I was like, I cannot, my soul cannot bear talking about Gilead and listening to Landslide at the same time. Who is coming for me?

A (88:55)

You don't do downers in downers. Can't do that. So trivia adaptations, rumors, mis tributed quotes, etc. We mentioned that Scorsese has the rights with Leo attached and there's only one role for him. Jack Bond.

B (89:07)

Gotta be Jack Bond.

A (89:08)

Gotta be that. I don't think this is happening. He's doing other stuff. I, I don't see this.

B (89:12)

They're shooting a different movie together right now with Jennifer Lawrence or it's shot

A (89:15)

or something or it's in production.

B (89:17)

Yeah.

A (89:18)

I think in reading this again, I did think a couple times of like Leo, I think he could do a couple of those. Jack, There's a darkness and light and goldenness to DiCaprio. That could work.

B (89:28)

I think so too. Our, our OG pick for this like 10 years ago was Joaquin Phoenix. And I think middle aged Leonardo DiCaprio is capable of the multitudes of Jack Boughton. I could totally see that because we're

A (89:42)

told that he's 43 in the book. 43, 44. And DiCaprio is a little bit older than that now, but he's. He could play younger and they could age him up a little bit. You mentioned the conversation. We'll link that. I'm sure Vanessa will link that. Do you want to say any more about that conversation?

B (89:56)

Yeah. So I think it is worth listening to. Robinson and Obama sat down in Iowa City in 2015 for about an hour long conversation that the New York Review of Books published both the text of and then a two part. They turned it into a two part podcast. Adds up to like two 30 minute episodes. It's gorgeous. It's mostly Obama interviewing Robinson asking her about her work and her history. They talk a lot about democracy. She made me cry. Talking about the root of democracy being the willingness to believe, well, of other people. To believe that other people want to do the right thing and are trying to do the right thing. The ways that they talk about what they see as a cultural. A troubling cultural shift and a slide toward consensus thinking feels even more potent now. And they also have like some moments talking about books where they're talking about like people are just reading so far inside their niches that we don't really get a great big like cultural event of a book anymore where like everyone read Gone with the Wind or everyone read To Kill a Mockingbird. And how does Robinson think about the role of books? And reading in a cultural landscape like now is even more niche because of TikTok. But it's worth listening to and also just like to weep for humanity of what we could have had. That like being reminded of an intellectual president who cared about art and was interested enough in the world to have read a lot of books and then to write letters to the great authors and to go to Iowa to be with her. Like he's not summoning her to the White House. Dude goes to Iowa. Just. It's really.

A (91:38)

That would be the great privilege. You know, I would never be present for like 17 different reasons, but I would definitely be like, can I. Does that buy me that I can have a cup of coffee with people like just right. Tell me the story.

B (91:49)

It does clearly other good trivia. Jack makes a kind of snide remark in his conversation with Reverend Ames about Iowa being the shining star of radicalism. That's a real quote. Ulysses S. Grant said it in 1868. Because Iowa was in at the time quite progressive. It was the first state to pass black suffrage. They never had anti miscegenation laws. The schools were never segregated. In fact it was illegal for the schools to be segregated. Now Iowa still hasn't always. Has always been and remains like largely white. Was largely white at the time that the story is set. But interesting that that's real here.

A (92:34)

The long effect of the. Of in Kansas. It's more true. It's differently true, I should say, of the long arm of the Free State movement. And even Kansas, which doesn't vote for Democratic presidents, will vote for Democratic governors and they will have these. The story is not. The story is not as simple as some might make it out to be. If you don't know when you're just looking at the electoral map every flag four years. But that there is a DNA there that is still fighting and. And struggling to express itself. I don't know phenotype of the.

B (93:04)

Of the land, if you experienced it in childhood in Lawrence. But I grew up in Kansas City or like the suburbs of Kansas City, so almost right on the line between Kansas and Missouri. And we went on field trips where we would like cross the Missouri line and they would show us homes that had the tunnels for the underground railroad and I think at one point you could even like walk through one of the tunnels from the Missouri side to the Kansas side that it's still so present just in the city's history and how the state thinks of itself.

A (93:31)

Yeah I just one from couple from me she wrote this in 18 months when she says like this is against type for me but like it wasn't. She wasn't writing this for 20 years. She just didn't have. She wasn't writing novel she was writing other things. In the meantime between housekeeping and Gilead she says that if she could have only written one book would have been Mother country which is her first nonfiction book about nuclear reactors and waste in England. She was in the UK for a while but I think she thinks of herself as a non fiction writer, thinker, essayist which her novels have taken on a life of their own is not right but I think she is unexpectedly a novelist and that's how people will remember her. She said she continued in the series because the leaving characters once a book over bereaves her and she couldn't bear to leave the characters of Gilead behind. It's been she did every six years for the last three it's been six years since Jack. I'm just putting it out there so I don't know at this point Hot takes Rebecca, what would you like to say?

B (94:25)

This is make America great again for liberals and I mean that in a complimentary sense.

A (94:30)

Yeah I have. Is this the great midwestern novel? What are the other contenders? Main street by Sinclair Lewis. That's Minnesota My Antonia which is Nebraska by Willa Cather. Some might say Grapes of Wrath but you don't know Two things. One, Oklahoma is not the Midwest. That's like a. That's like an appendage on Texas and it's mostly about leaving Oklahoma. So this was just my my stray thoughts here. I'm not sure if anything comes to mind. You can choose emails you're to well read at podcast excuse me@buckwheret.com if you want to contend but that could be a different experiment but for me I think this is morally intellectual in a sensibility wise the great yes and the

B (95:07)

Midwest gets written off so much like as flyover states and this is a real exercise in showing the beauty and the value in these places for the

A (95:18)

reading Rex Rita likes books, music, movies. What else where else people go if you want to if they want to keep the vibe going from you can

B (95:25)

of course complete the set Robinson builds out the world of Gilead With Home, which is from the perspective of Reverend Boughton's daughter Glory Lila, which gives us the backstory of Reverend Ames's wife. And then Jack gives us more about Jack Boughton. I think you could pick up the work of Mary Oliver. Devotions is a big, beautiful hard cover that collects work from across her career. Maybe George Saunders for another, albeit very, very different.

A (95:52)

The humanity spins out a different radical.

B (95:56)

It comes to a different approach to using fiction to ask questions about morality and theology. But Sanders is doing them. And then Robinson's descriptions of both John Brown and Ames grandfather brought to mind for me first the image of Ethan Hawke as John Brown in the adaptation of the Good Lord Bird. But I think James McBride's the Good Lord Bird for more of the John Brown Civil War kinds of stories.

A (96:21)

Yeah, I went way back to. To Montaigne's the Essays. The. The OG of Let me sit around and think about my life and what I think and try it out. We will get to the essays at some point here, but this is, you know, Montaigne basically went into his tower to just think and write and read for several years. And he produced this thing that we call a series of essays. It didn't really exist before. This essay means to attempt. I believe in. That's the original French to to attempt or try. And I like that idea. Both to know the truth of it, but then to take that and hold that as you're reading someone who is doing something essay liked, which of course Reverend Ames is doing here. This is an attempt at something. This is not necessarily the thing. This is the attempt at the thing. And that's all you can do. Cocktail party crib Shade three to five takeaways Rebecca, what do you have?

B (97:09)

The rare novel about spiritual life. But you don't need to be religious to appreciate it or connect to it. And the big takeaway, I do think, is that grace is transformative for both the giver and the receiver. And that you'll almost never regret slowing down to consider all that you might not know about a person. If there's a message to this book, that's what it is.

A (97:29)

This is one of the great creations of consciousness ever performed. I would put it up there with Hamlet, the narrator of Invisible man, and whoever else you want. I will put the good Reverend alongside those. And I say, even saying that the great. Even the great interlocutor that Ames is still has trouble connecting with the people closest to him. That such as is and such it shall be. All right. Final beat a zero to well read score. Each one gets a score from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest. Our five vectors of evaluation are historical importance, readability, current relevance of central questions, book nerd read, cred, and oh damn factor historical importance. For some, this is as high as it can be for something that's only 22 years old, I think.

B (98:10)

Yeah, yeah. Eight

A (98:14)

has. I guess we haven't really talked about this. Maybe one demerit towards this. I don't think of a demerit in a existential way is this is not at the bleeding edge of contemporary thinking about art or ideas. This feels old fashioned even though it's not because there aren't a lot of books like this before.

B (98:34)

It feels. It feels like a relic and a document of both 2004 sensibilities and 1950s sensibilities. The way that we want that, the way that we understood the past.

A (98:49)

It's Obama corps. It's Obama's Obama corps. Like Hamilton's Obama corps, Gilead's Obama corps.

B (98:54)

I mean I think it's too young really to know the big historical importance, but right here with it as number 10 on the top 100 books of the century, I. I think it continues to be no lower than for a while. 7.5.

A (99:12)

Sure.

B (99:13)

Okay.

A (99:15)

Readability, I think because it doesn't have the page turningness and there are some complicated ideas, I think that knocks it down a little. But no lower than eight for me.

B (99:24)

Yeah, I agree. It's an eight. Like you can let your eyes glaze over when he's talking about Ferbach. That's okay. Current relevance of central questions. 965.

A (99:36)

Yeah, book nerd read creds. Interesting. I have no sense of this. I'm too close to the sun to accurately gauge the horizon for this.

B (99:46)

I think it's actually pretty high like there. I should have looked at how many Goodreads ratings there are.

A (99:52)

I didn't look at that. I couldn't bear. I saw the the aggregate rating in Apple Books is 3.6 and I wanted to throw myself off something tall that makes me.

B (100:00)

That does make me want to cry. There's 126,000 Goodreads ratings, which is not many. So I do think this is not nearly as widely read by just reader civilians as we would wish it would be.

A (100:14)

Also means that people don't know who Marilynne Robinson is to give you your read cred, earned or not.

B (100:18)

Right. I'm going pretty high. I think this is like an eight.

A (100:22)

Okay. Oh, damn factor. This is our catch. All turn for boy. I didn't know you could do that. And boy, look at art. Look at writing. And that's a 10.

B (100:30)

It's a 10.

A (100:31)

That's a 10.

B (100:32)

Just unhesitatingly. It's a 10. It's a ten from page one.

A (100:35)

Yep. Well, we did it, Rebecca. We did very little verklempt, actually.

B (100:41)

Neither of us cried.

A (100:43)

Really incredible processes that we perform. We're professionals here. You can find and I will not. I hold no such promise for our office hours recording. Who knows what's going to happen. You can find that if you want to subscribe. Plus our free newsletter with detailed show notes and other membership options including early ad free episodes@patreon.com 02Well Read Follow us on the Socials at 02Well Read podcast. Choose emails. You're too well read at. Excuse me. Email us at zero to well read@book riot.com thanks to Thriftbooks for sponsoring this season. Zero to well read and zero to well read is a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network. Rebecca. Let's go out there and be brave.

B (101:24)

Let's do it.

A (101:25)

Our country.

B (101:26)

I'm ready. I've been reinforced by Marilyn Robinson.