Soft light suffused the room. I turned the page of the book. “That was loneliness. When you’re scalded, touch hurts, it makes no difference if it’s kindly meant.” To me, in my darkened bedroom, with the clangor of the street filtering through my shades, those words were everything. So patently true, yet when sharpened against the backdrop of their own context, they are obviously false.

Marilynne Robinson’s most recent novel tells the story of a woman, a people, for whom grace is not even a name, hope is always false, and faith is a sure mistake. Church is a place where suckers go to leave their money. And towns are where they look at you and you look straight ahead. Lila introduces into the idyllic world of Gilead and Home (two of Robinson’s previous novels) the problem of the unbaptized.

Previously, Robinson sculpted an entire community, a landscape for her characters. This landscape has hitherto been populated by middle America: decent, bourgeois, law-abiding, and Christian. Lila is a foreign element in this world. Her story is one of pain, loneliness, and mistrust. She worked an orchard in California, a whorehouse in St. Louis. And yet, she becomes the wife of John Ames, the placid and holy preacher and narrator of Gilead

To the biblical reader, it is tempting to read Lila through the hermeneutic of Hosea, the prophet God orders to marry a whore. The image of him forever chasing after his unfaithful wife, however, is not the image Robinson chooses for the book. Rather, Lila returns again and again to Ezekiel’s image of a child weltering in its blood, left by the highway, abandoned. Lila identifies herself as this child. Her savior, however, is not John Ames, but Doll, a woman scarred physically and spiritually, forever fleeing the capture of law and decent society. Doll is, by all accounts, scalded (her scar is from a burn); she is harsh, even cruel. But, for no reason save a desire to love, she takes in Lila, a scrappy, skinny girl-child, unnamed and ignorant even of her parents’ identity.

Doll is Lila’s first experience of God. She is Lila’s first experience of love. And, this memory of being taken up and protected sustains Lila through her lonely sojourn. Though members of no church, Doll and Lila act as conduits of grace for each other, softening the harshness of their own mistrustful world. To John Ames’ rigidly Calvinist friend, Boughton, the grace God has given to Lila and Doll is invisible. Doll cannot be saved. She remained outside the Church. Yet, we see the results of grace vividly, for the novel is not so much a collection of Lila’s memories, organized at random, but her lengthy prayer—a prayer, not learned from the lips of a pastor, but from the receipt of love.

The reverend is always in prayer. Lila knows it. His head slips forward on his breast; his hands are folded. He prays for Lila, for Doll, for all the souls in his flock. But, Lila, when asked what she’s thinking, replies,

“Nothing, really. Existence,” which made [the reverend] laugh with surprise and then apologize for laughing. He said, “I’d be interested to know your thoughts on it.”

“I just don’t know what to think about it at all sometimes.”


The novel is a narration of the things Lila has treasured up in her heart. Lila does not know that her thoughts are contemplation. Likewise, in her autobiography, St. Thérèse describes a similar phenomenon: “I preferred to go sit by myself on the flowering grass, since my thoughts were rather profound, and without knowing what it was to meditate, my soul plunged into real prayer…” (italics in text, translation my own).

In Lila, we are privileged to witness a soul discovering prayer, not as an outsider but from within the soul itself. Robinson so skillfully crafts the novel that Lila’s thoughts are our thoughts. To read it is to sink into a real meditative prayer oneself. As such, the novel is in a class of its own. Whereas most authors either omit spirituality entirely or treat it as a kind of prop, a signifier of a certain character’s moral weight or integrity (Hugo’s bishop in Les Misérables, Alexei in the Brothers Karamazov), Robinson sets the action of the novel on the spiritual plain. Prayer is not a plot device; we learn Lila’s life through her prayer.

And yet, Robinson is never heavy-handed in this endeavor. She is not attempting to convert or persuade. Rather, she leads us into the meditation of Thérèse and Lila by inviting us to contemplate the strange, sad beauty of existence.