I missed Home when it appeared after a long hiatus, but was interested in Gilead and, having just re-read it, I agree that it deserved the Pulitzer Prize. Indeed, I found the experience of reading Housekeeping somewhat like eating a too-rich Thanksgiving stuffing. This was no Flannery O’Connor, or Elizabeth Bowen. For me there were no tingles in it, I felt it was contrived, and the language did not blow me away. Although everyone I knew was raving about Marilynne Robinson’s debut novel Housekeeping and although an English friend was the film editor of the subsequent movie, I have always felt like odd man out regarding that highly touted book. I guess it is only fair to begin way back in the early 1980s. Lila by Marilynne Robinson, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 272 pages, $26. Lila is an ambitious book that is deeply flawed and not nearly in the same class as Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead.
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