‘Lila’: Pulitizer-prize winner pens sequel worth waiting for

In her Pulitzer-prize winning novel 'Gilead,” Marilynne Robinson explored the depths of the aged Rev. John Ames as he wrote reflections to the young son he would not live to see grow up. Throughout the novel readers were privy to the Reverend's innermost thoughts, but what of Lila, the Reverend's much-younger bride? Who was this hardscrabble woman who drifted into the small town of Gilead, Iowa, and became an untraditional preacher's wife?

The answers come in Robinson's latest masterpiece, 'Lila,” a meditative novel that explores Lila's life from her youth as a field hand to her marriage and the birth of her son. It is a novel about a woman as tough as the Iowa prairie, and with as much reach as the summer sky. In this work Robinson has done the impossible: by the novel's conclusion, Lila is both an intimate companion and still a remarkable mystery.

Left on a stoop as a child, Lila is cared for by a drifter named Doll, who teaches Lila the value of hard work and the importance of carrying a knife. The world is mean, and Lila learns it is best not to hope. 'Don't hope. Just wait.” As a result she is slow to trust and moves along the outskirts of Gilead - and life - with skittish quickness of a feral cat.

But Reverend Ames is patient, and together they make a loving home. No other writer but Robinson could turn a conversation about Ezekiel into something heartbreakingly romantic, or capture so beautifully the intimacy of lying awake next to the person you love and feeling at once the peace and complete terror of unconditional love.

The topics are weighty and Robinson, like Lila, does not pause for those who cannot keep step. There are no chapters; rather Lila moves at a measured clip between the past and the present, with ruminations on existence and theology interspersed.

Yes, it's challenging - many good things are. But 'Lila,” both the novel and the character, is worth it.