Lila. By Marilynne Robinson.Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 272 pages; $26. Virago; £16.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.ukOVER the course of three novels set in the fictional town of Gilead, Iowa, Marilynne Robinson does what novelists are supposed to find impossible: she makes virtuous people interesting. Perhaps even more impressively, she makes their virtues interesting. The novels have an old-fashioned preoccupation with virtue, grace and their relation to lives as lived; though they are set in the 1950s their concerns are distinctly 18th-century.John Ames, a 76-year-old Congregationalist preacher whose letter to his young son makes up the entirety of “Gilead”, the first of the three books, has had a tragic life, losing his first wife and child, as well as three siblings, but he remains both personally devout and devoted to pastoral care. In the hands of a less clear-eyed novelist his loving...
from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/103DMBa
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