Friday Faces: Book Club — Lila

Hello, Friday! How are we at the end of October already? Just a reminder this weekend is the end of Daylight Saving Time. Extra hour of sleep anyone?

Our Friday Faces: Book Club series continues and we have more SLOCA staff to introduce you to and another book — Lila by Marilynne Robinson. This week’s book is different from the ones we have previously featured in that it is a novel. Here is a brief summary written by our Curriculum Coordinator, Edie Overton.

Lila is a migrant drifter child, then a migrant drifter woman, who eventually becomes the much younger wife of the elderly, widowed John Ames – and the mother of the boy being addressed in Gilead, the first novel in the series depicting the Ames and Broughton families in the town of Gilead.

Lila’s personal tale mirrors the Dust Bowl stories of the Depression era – truly desperate times. When she is a gravely ill child about three years old, she is kidnapped by a rough woman called Doll. Her kidnapping may have been Lila’s salvation for her family may have let her die. Lila and Doll are on the run most of the time, knowing no permanent situation, creature comforts or material possessions. Despite bouts of petty violence and moments of desperation, their shared life was laced with moments of joy and love. When Lila arrives in Gilead, she struggles to reconcile the life of her makeshift family and their days of hardship with the gentle Christian worldview of her husband which paradoxically judges those she loves.

Lila, homeless and alone after years of roaming the countryside, steps inside a small-town Iowa church-the only available shelter from the rain-and ignites a romance and a debate that will reshape her life. She becomes the wife of a minister, John Ames, and begins a new existence while trying to make sense of the life that preceded her newfound security.

In the end, Lila is not so much a novel as a meditation on morality and psychology, compelling its frankness about its truly shocking subject: the damage to the human personality done by poverty, neglect and abandonment.

Now that you are a little more familiar with the book Lila, meet some of our fabulous staff, and enjoy hearing their thoughts on this book.

Why should someone add this book to their reading list?

• Sage: After much thought and many years, I’ve recently committed to saying that my favorite book of all time is Pride and Prejudice. Though a very different book, I think Lila is my second favorite romance I’ve ever read, following only Pride and Prejudice. But, like Austen’s masterpiece, this book is also so much more! It’s a book about the impossibility of knowing anyone fully, it’s a book about shame and the redeeming power of love that goes beyond the romantic and into the unconditional, and it’s a book about a very familiar, very human sense of longing—for freedom, for a return of the past, and even for eternity.
• Paul: Read Lila if you are looking for a totally different kind of love story. Real love rarely takes the forms we expect. It is never abstract or sentimental. Thus, Lila takes a “show, don’t tell” approach to the traditional marriage plot, showing us a love that relentlessly seeks the good of others, while protecting and cherishing their essential other-ness. It’s tough these days to say anything true about love without sounding platitudinous–it’s all been said before. So Lila is not an easy or conventional love story–its artistry clearly owes a great deal to modernist masters like Faulkner and Hemingway, where so much depends on nuances of tone, a pause, a gesture. However, I cannot imagine anyone encountering these characters without feeling a lasting kinship with them that changes you for the better. Lila will deepen your sense of the mystery and the wonder of what we can be for one another, even on an ordinary Sunday morning in an ordinary town in Iowa.
• Gil: The protagonist of the book is constantly dealing with the heavy trauma of abandonment and as such, it is a painful reminder that our lives are a frequent battle of overcoming those events and people that disappoint us along the way. I feel that a lot of people would be able to relate to that.
• Amy: This book is uniquely written, and I am inspired to read Gilead and Jack.

The best things that happen I’d never have thought to pray for. In a million years. The worst things just come like weather. You do what you can.

— Lila, by Marilynne Robinson

How did this book impact you?

• Sage: There’s always more to someone than meets the eye—and yet we can still strive to love a person and to meet them where they are. Lila, the main character, doesn’t share much with the people around her—neither her deep hurts nor her rich interior thought life. It would be hard to love such a person, not knowing what she’s been through or what she feels or thinks. Yet there is one character throughout the book who approaches her with such gentleness and humility that she can’t help but love him back. I am often able to be more kind to people when I know their story—when I know at least some of what has happened to them, what bothers them and why, and what interests them. It is much harder to love someone when you don’t feel close to them, when you don’t even know them. I want to get better at this—at reaching out to someone where they are (even if I don’t know where that is), rather than insisting they come where I am or asking them to meet me in the middle.
• Paul: It’s all too easy for me to live day-to-day on the surface of things, and interpret the world through the ready-made lens of my ego, or the latest news cycle, or what have you. Reading Lila felt like receiving new eyes to see with, becoming more attuned to my own interiority and that of others. This is a novel brimming with everyday beauty. That beauty does not cancel out all the ugly stuff in the world–there’s plenty of that in the novel, too–but it does give us a way to hold and contain the bad stuff, which may be the best that we can do with it for now.
• Gil: The book reminded me that life is too short to allow sadness and sorrow to prevail. It is a reminder that fighting for what is right is not easy but it needs to be done with bravery and determination.
• Amy: One small part of the book stood out to me and I was left with the reminder of how important it is to just be kind.

It’s all a prayer. Family is a prayer. Wife is a prayer. Marriage is a prayer.

— Lila, by Marilynne Robinson

What is your go-to reading spot?

• Sage: My bed, especially on cloudy days.
• Paul: I’m not too particular. Anywhere quiet enough to hear leaves rustling. For me, the book makes the reading spot, really.
• Gil: The recliner in my tiny living room. Either early in the morning or late at night.
• Amy: I usually read in bed, it is the only time our house is quiet.

What is the weirdest snack you like to eat?

• Sage: Dinner leftovers for breakfast. The last time I did this it was pork curry at 8:30 am.
• Paul: Everything is better with peanut butter on it. Everything.
• Gil: Popcorn with Reese’s pieces. But I’m on a diet so I’ve been eating mostly pistachios and anything with hummus.
• Amy: I don’t really snack, but I do have a newly acquired love for pepperoncini on my sandwiches!

That’s one good thing about the way life is, that no one can know you if you don’t let them.

— Lila, by Marilynne Robinson

Thank you to these wonderful staff who let us get to know them just a little bit more through this virtual book club.

Have you read Lila or any other books by Marilynne Robinson? Share your thoughts and recommendations below.