You couldn’t ask for a homier book to read than Marilynne Robinson’s new novel­—Home feels familiar to the reader from page one.

Robinson’s third work of fiction—a companion to her earlier work, Gilead—takes place in Gilead, Iowa, a drowsy and largely homogenous town. A Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Robinson herself is from the Pacific Northwest, but she became familiar with her region of interest during her post at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

An elegant reprisal of the story of the prodigal son, Home unfolds with the return of Jack, a son of the former pastor of Gilead, Robert Boughton. Upon Jack’s return, he sees Glory, his sister who has also returned, nursing their father, as well as her own heart, back to health. Yet Robinson reverses the narrative and readers hear Jack’s story through the eyes of Glory. The elegantly structured book reads quietly and with a touch of melancholy, like an Annie Proulx or Willa Cather novel at its best. The power, though, lies in the claustrophobic narrowness of the scope. It is very much self-involved, like Steinbeck’s East of Eden, but instead of building upon change, it flows along as if nothing has changed, or is changing.

The only perceptible character developments are minute: Jack, unlike the way he vanished from Gilead for 20 years when he got an underage girl pregnant, fixes the car, cleans the yard, and helps his feeble father with the challenges of daily life.
Jack’s transformation, though subtle, fares powerfully especially at story’s end. The poignant exchange between Jack’s wife and Glory proves to be a powerful one that partially elucidates Jack’s unfathomable psychology.

However, like a difficult puzzle, Jack can’t really be understood, from start to finish. The prodigal son archetype, then, is never fulfilled here, as Jack remains only partially transformed, only slightly redeemed.

The identity of Jack’s wife Della brings the story back full-circle, yet her significance is never fully explained. She remains a vehicle for Jack’s evolution, but at the same time veiled. She speaks just a few lines, and she, like Jack, talks in riddles, and guards the remaining information.

Though Robinson does not give a sense of completion to the book—not one character seems to have reached closure, not Robert, Glory, Della, or even Jack—she surely uses her insular platform to address larger cultural issues, and in particular, the tumultuous racial divide in 1950s America.

The book builds up in the way poetry sometimes does—in a slow, repetitive sequence that gives way to larger meaning. It is hard to discern what that meaning is here, but for those who enjoy that patient wait, that difficult search, this book is a catch. It holds a subtle beauty and an elusive mystery that is sure to make the reader work for it.