Gilead, Home, and the Undertow of Transience 
 So Marilynne Robinson returns once more to the small Iowa town immortalized in her Pulitzer Prizewinning novel Gilead; is there really enough material there for three books? When Home, the second novel, came out, my answer was almost but not quite. Now with Lila, I have no doubt. This is every bit as rich and self-contained a book as either of its predecessors, a deeply moving meditation on life, love, and God. It is the simplest of the three novels, and the earliest in time, essentially the story of how the elderly preacher John Ames meets and marries his second wife, a former drifter who goes by the name of Lila. But it is also the most complex, weaving past and present, thought and action, together into a multi-layered texture that reminds me strongly of Faulkner--another writer who mined riches from the lives of a few families in a restricted rural location. It is a work of heartbreaking beauty. 
 We meet Lila as a very young child, stolen from a house where she has been neglected and left to die. Her rescuer is a drifter named Doll. She nurses the girl back to health, and joins a small group of other transients, living by doing odd jobs until the Depression and the Dust Bowl force them to split up. At one point, Doll stays put for long enough for Lila to get a year of schooling. It is enough to teach her to read and do arithmetic; she is a very bright student. Somehow, parted from Doll, Lila ends up in Gilead, living in a deserted shack outside the town, and offering gardening and household help to meet her small needs. Before long, she has met John Ames, one of the town's two preachers, an elderly widower. When she calls on him one morning, he offers her coffee, and asks her to tell him a little about herself: 
 She shook her head. "I don't talk about that. I just been wondering lately why things happen the way they do." 
 "Oh!" he said. "Then I'm glad you have some time to spare. I've been wondering about that more or less my whole life." 
 Lila's question and Ames' attempt to answer it form the theological mainspring of the book. For in addition to being a story of two lonely people coming together, this is also a book about religious belief, more explicitly so than either of its predecessors. Those who have read Gilead (though that is not necessary*) will know what a beautiful character John Ames is: a man of God, but a modest and above all a kind one. Christianity is in his bones and blood, and yet there is nothing doctrinaire about him; he talks to God, but has no time for Hell; his is a religion of welcome, never exclusion. His world is an extremely attractive one for me, as a former believer who remains interested in religion's attempts to answer the big questions, but utterly resists signing up for any faith. 
 I should say, however, that this is far from theology for the masses. The books in her stolen Bible that Lila copies out to improve her handwriting, and ponders as she does so, are among the most difficult ones, Ezekiel and Job. "It could be that the wildest, strangest things in the Bible," she thinks, "were the places where it touched earth." Without fully understanding them, Lila is attracted to the verses in Ezekiel about the lightning and the whirlwind, or the babe abandoned in the field, weltering in its blood. Ames too tries to make the Bible touch earth: in affirming its relevance to his own life, explaining it to Lila, respecting the wild thing that she is, and building trust and tenderness between them. 
 Marilynne Robinson's 1980 novel Housekeeping, written almost a quarter-century before her next one, Gilead, is also about drifters. Its back cover contains a phrase that has long stuck with me, "The dangerous undertow of transience." I am struck by how Robinson's themes keep folding back on each other: transience, Gilead, home. I had always thought of home as a place to settle, a place to build, and place that you would never have to leave again. But in Lila, Robinson shows that the undertow of transience is always present, too. Even after they are married, Lila is not fully ready to settle with Ames, and he also accepts that she is liable to go off at any moment. This is where the influence of Faulkner comes in. It is not simply a matter of present-day narrative and flashbacks. Past and present are folded together inextricably, each growing within the other. At all times, Lila carries with her the memories of where she has been, what she has suffered, and the people she has loved. Gradually, we learn more about her, and come to revise our estimates of her age, background, and character. She is no angel, and has been through more than we ever knew. But we come to see her as truly a good person, and Ames' love becomes in turn our own. 
 A small example. After Lila has given birth to the young son whom we will glimpse in Gilead, Ames decides to take him fishing. Lila imagines telling the story to him once he is old enough to understand: 
 He had his pole and creel in his hand and you in the crook of his arm and he went off down the road in the morning sunshine, striding along like a younger man, talking to you, laughing. He came back an hour later. He set the empty creel on the table and said, "We propped the pole and watched dragonflies. Then we got a little tired." And what a look he gave her, in the sorrow of his happiness. 
 With countless scenes like that, Marilynne Robinson offers her readers a radiant gift. And that final phrase is sheer genius. 
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 I would go further and urge that you read Lila first, if you have not read Gilead. Otherwise, read this as though it were first. This counteracts the tendency to see the book as merely the back-story of a character being groomed for a minor role in the more famous novel, and Lila can appear as the wild force that she is, as protagonist in her own right.