Why I Love Lila

Lila, by Marilynne Robinson, is a novel that gently and effortlessly changes your perception. Part of a series that includes one of President Obama’s favorite novels, Gilead, and Home, one of my favorite books I read last year, Lila immediately changed how I thought of the previous two books in the series. Each of the books tell the story of the lives of the Ames and Boughton families from different perspectives. Gilead is told from the perspective of Rev. John Ames, Lila’s older husband, as a series of letters to their young son. Home takes place simultaneously to Gilead but from the perspective of Glory Boughton. In both books, Lila is present, but a mysterious figure. It’s obvious that there is more to her story, but the questions of her life and why she married Rev. Ames in his old age are left open. Instead, the rest of the novels in the series focus on Jack Boughton, the complicated prodigal son. Personally, I assumed Lila ran away from a bad situation, divorce or an abusive father, but the novel Lila reveals that she was homeless and had been for most of her life.

There’s a school or literary criticism called Russian Formalism that holds that what differentiates poetical language from regular prose language is defamiliarization. Most of the time, we see things without truly perceiving them. We perceive what our brains expect to see, not what is. For example, I lost a glove earlier today, and I walked past it twice while I was looking for it. It was in the middle of the floor, completely visible, but I didn’t perceive the glove, because I didn’t expect to see it. According to the Russian Formalists, this automatic frame of perception needs to be disrupted, and “the purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.” Art should make us take time with how we see things, because when the things that are all around us, things like water and light even existence itself, are seen as without the blinders of our expectations, that is a good in and of itself.

Lila is defamiliarizing on several levels. First and foremost, Lila defamiliarizes homelessness. We treat the homeless as objects, with no ascribed interiority. Lila has such a rich interior life, with an amazing depth of thought and feeling. I hope it makes it impossible for me to pretend the homeless are just the homeless and not people. In a more Formalist sense, the writing is full of beautiful descriptions of ordinary things. Robinson describes her worldview in an interview with Ezra Klein as “constantly permeable to meaningful experience that is also conventional experience,” and in her hands, simple things like flowers growing along a road, drops of water falling through the sunlight, and dust hanging in the air are imbued with transcendence. Yet, it isn’t Lila who is imbuing them with their magnificence. Conventional experience for Lila is meaningful and awesome. She doesn’t make them so, but she has the gift of perceiving the ordinary as it truly is. 

For the series as a whole, Lila enriches and fills my perceptions of Gilead and Home. Rev. John Ames is a good man who lives a quiet life in a sleepy town, or at least that is what it seems. I never really questioned the integrity and goodness of Rev. Ames, but there was a little bit of a lingering question, for both me as the reader and Ames as a person, what would he do if he was pushed? Would his goodness truly stand up to trying times? Ames worries that he cannot live up to neither the righteous passion with which his grandfather fought for abolition, nor the unyielding conviction to peace that his father carried. I always wondered if his harsh and jagged relationship with Jack Boughton was an outlier to his character or the deepest propensity. Lila changes these questions. When Gilead takes place, the goodness of Ames has already been tried when he falls in love with the homeless and uncertain Lila. Through everything, Ames is faithful, generous, and tender. I now know that Jack is an outlier for John Ames, but the tragedy is all the more poignant because of that. Ames can see the good in everyone. He sees value, and complexity, and deep, deep thought in Lila, even when she can only see herself as a simple, uneducated, failed prostitute. Ames is absolutely right about Lila, and it makes me wish all the more he could see the good in Jack.   

Finally, Lila breaks the mold of books that ask the ‘deep questions’ of life. Lila explicitly states the question of the book with her customary uncluttered profundity: why do things happen the way they do? Many books grapple with this question, I think none better than War and Peace and other Russian Literature from the second half of the 1800s. While Lila is asking the same weighty questions, I love Lila because it answers them with such lightness, love, and joy. With Russian Literature, it is obvious that the world is full of suffering. People waste away with tuberculosis, and war fills the air with smoke, hair with lice, and bellies with horseflesh. The poor are hapless pawns for the powerful, and while the powerful have all the wealth and pleasure they could wish for, happiness is always just out of reach. Lila, the woman, has seen suffering. Her parents neglected her, so a homeless woman called Doll stole/rescued Lila from them. She grew up on the road, working when she could until the work dried up in the Depression. Doll, the only person that ever loved her, eventually kills her birth father when he comes looking for Lila, escapes from prison, and Lila never learns if she lived or died. After losing Doll, Lila tries to work as a prostitute, but can’t manage to do that either. She can’t hide the hatred she feels towards the men. Eventually, she wanders into a town called Gilead. While squatting in a shack, she steps into a church to get out of the rain, and there she locks eyes with Rev. John Ames.

Lila’s life is full of extreme loss and suffering, but the novel floats with grace and joy. The pain is not ignored, but Lila doesn’t seem to feel the immense weight of all she’s been through. Somehow, love is stronger. Love suffuses the tone and essence of the novel. It sweeps over Lila in ways she never expected were possible: “I guess somethings the matter with me, old man. I can’t love you as much as I love you. I can’t feel as happy as I am.” For Lila, and for me, love makes the world, it makes all of existence, something wholly unfamiliar, and I can finally see it as good, in and of itself. When I was finally filled with God’s Love for me, and later when I fell in love, it broke all the ways I automatically perceived the world. For years, I could only see life as painful waiting for death, but if I could experience love and happiness like that, if they weren’t impossible, maybe I was wrong, blessedly wrong, about everything. Lila is one of the few novels I’ve read, if not the only novel that I read, that is so transformed by the goodness of the Love of God. Through this Love and the love she shares with Ames, Lila’s life, an unbroken string of sufferings, becomes light and lovely. Her life always was always part of the eternal goodness of existence, and through love, she sees life as it truly is.