Lila (Oprah's Book Club)

By: Marilynne Robinson

Narrated by: Maggie Hoffman

Length: 8 hrs and 57 mins

Publisher's summary

A new American classic from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gilead and Housekeeping. Marilynne Robinson, one of the greatest novelists of our time, returns to the town of Gilead in an unforgettable story of a girlhood lived on the fringes of society in fear, awe, and wonder.

Lila, homeless and alone after years of roaming the countryside, steps inside a small-town Iowa church - the only available shelter from the rain - and ignites a romance and a debate that will reshape her life. She becomes the wife of a minister, John Ames, and begins a new existence while trying to make sense of the life that preceded her newfound security.

Neglected as a toddler, Lila was rescued by Doll, a canny young drifter, and brought up by her in a hardscrabble childhood. Together they crafted a life on the run, living hand to mouth with nothing but their sisterly bond and a ragged blade to protect them. Despite bouts of petty violence and moments of desperation, their shared life was laced with moments of joy and love. When Lila arrives in Gilead, she struggles to reconcile the life of her makeshift family and their days of hardship with the gentle Christian worldview of her husband which paradoxically judges those she loves.

Revisiting the beloved characters and setting of Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead and Home, a National Book Award finalist, Lila is a moving expression of the mysteries of existence that is destined to become an American classic.

©2014 Marilynne Robinson (P)2014 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

2015, Folio Prize Nominee

2014, Christian Science Monitor Best Books of the Year

2014, National Book Awards - Finalist

2015, Man Booker Award - Nominee

2014, NPR Best Book of the Year

2014, Washington Post Best Books of the Year

2014, Seattle Times Best Books of the Year

2014, New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year

2014, National Book Critics Circle Award - Nominee

2014, Los Angeles Times Holiday Books Guide

“Lila is a book whose grandeur is found in its humility. That's what makes Gilead among the most memorable settings in American fiction . . . Gilead [is] a kind of mythic everyplace, a quintessential national setting where our country's complicated union with faith, in all its degrees of constancy and skepticism, is enacted.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

“Literary lioness Robinson--she's won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, a Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Award, among other laurels--continues the soaring run of novels with loosely connected story lines and deep religious currents that she launched a decade ago, almost a quarter century after her acclaimed fiction debut, Housekeeping . . . Lila's journey--its darker passages illuminated by Robinson's ability to write about love and the natural world with grit and graceful reverence--will mesmerize both longtime Robinson devotees and those coming to her work for the first time.” —Elle

“Ever since the publication of Robinson's thrilling first novel, Housekeeping, reviewers have been pointing out that, for an analyst of modern alienation, she is an unusual specimen: a devout Protestant, reared in Idaho. She now lives in Iowa City, where she teaches at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and where, for years, she has been accustomed to interrupting her career as a novelist to produce essays on such matters as the truth of John Calvin's writings. But Robinson's Low Church allegiance has hugely benefited her fiction . . . This is an unflinching book.” —Joan Acocella, The New Yorker

“Radiant . . . As in Gilead and Home, Robinson steps away from the conventions of the realistic novel to deal with metaphysical abstractions, signaling by the formality of her language her adoption of another convention, by which characters inhabiting an almost Norman Rockwell-ish world . . . live and think on a spiritual plane . . . [Lila is] a mediation on morality and psychology, compelling in its frankness about its truly shocking subject: the damage to the human personality done by poverty, neglect and abandonment.” —Diane Johnson, The New York Times Book Review

Great read

Beautiful story. Very insightful author. Well performed but a little more dramatic than necessary at moments.

Marvelous writer of a wonderful story

Rounds out the stories told in Gilead and Home beautifully. Plus, her writing is gorgeous.

Lila

A bit slow in the first 3-4 chapters. The author does an excellent job with character development. Her writing style is colorful and descriptive, which is delightful.

Disapointed

I really struggled to finish the book. The story was not at all what I expected.

Hard to follow

It was difficult for me to tell when Lila was in her head and when life was actually happening. The book never quite reached a climax. I kept expecting something exciting to happen but it never did. This book was just ok for me.

"Salvation by grace"

Calvinism in reference to "predestination" was cited in the first two books ("Gilead" and "Home") including a a passage in "HOME" describing Lila's piqued interest of the subject during a porch interpretation setting the stage for this book. Lila" is a book that will stay with you long after the last read or listened to word: melancholy, heartbreaking, still with elements of hope and hard driven faith and yes...predestination/predetermination or "fate". The narrator captured all the characters nuances. I am hoping for one more "Gilead" book.

One of Robinson’s best

I’d read all of Ms. Robinson’s novels prior to “Jack” other than “Lila” and thought I would listen to this simply to re-engage in the world of Gilead before picking up her newest book. What a revelation! “Lila” is her best since “Housekeeping” and may exceed that masterpiece. It is thoughtful, compassionate, spiritual without preaching and such a warm and hopeful book. Highly recommended!

Masterful portrayal of trauma and shame and the road to healing.

Rarely does an author capture the reality of trauma and pain and how they interfere with connection and joy. A beautiful, quiet, and gentle book for the ages. The performance was perfect. Although the book is grounded in Christian traditions and teachings, its message about the difficult path to healing is for everyone.

As Good As It Gets

What about Maggie Hoffman’s performance did you like?

It's hard to pinpoint, but hard to forget. She has a gentle voice and a slight Southern lilt that accents the entire story.

Any additional comments?

Having loved and admired Gilead and Home, I was a little nervous about Lila, wondering whether Robinson could possibly live up to the high standards she’d set for herself in the Gilead novels. The first several pages had me disappointed – Lila in a setting very different from the Gilead I’d come to feel I knew very well – and then the lights switched on: it became clear to me that the point of Lila is that she has no history. At best, she has snatches of memory, but they’re deeply personal, without names that have consequence. (The name she takes is a mistake, an accidental appropriation of the first name of the woman who kidnaps her as a child, and at least one later person thinks she is Norwegian because of it.) She is, in other words, a blank book.
That’s an intriguing premise on its own, and Robinson does some striking things with it. Lila has so little sense of who she is or where she’s been that she has to discover, almost in literal fashion (as she learns its name only late in childhood) the United States of America. She is a latecomer who is also a native, someone unmistakably of the nation and yet needing to learn bit by bit what that means. And she does that learning through her early travels and through her later conversations with Ames over the Bible. She is, again almost literally, a child of God, someone profoundly innocent and yet perpetually threatened by the world.

I’d call that a success on its own terms if that all this were. Put it in conversation with Gilead, though, and it’s mind-blowing. To my eyes at least, Gilead is the story of a man trying to negotiate a too-thick history surrounding him. He has to try to live up to the legacy of his abolitionist grandfather, a man who has almost certainly committed murder in the name of freeing the slaves, and the simultaneous legacy of his pacifist father who rejected that violence. Ames has lived too long in his town, outlived all that originally defined him with the sole exception of Boughton, his life-long friend and fellow minister. They have had a deep and rich friendship (and that friendship is one of the great literary inventions I’ve come across in at least the last decade) but it has always been framed through text, through their shared and diverging senses of what scripture tells them to do in this odd post-World War II world.

Anyway, Ames is a man steeped in history, a man so aware of it – and simultaneously so aware of his imminent departure from it through death – that he creates a manuscript to record it for his son who is as yet too young to learn it firsthand. He cannot escape text, even as he understands himself to be slowly dying; he writes of his life for his son, a life so steeped in history that he can’t frame it through the experience of his own personal history.
When you put those two into conversation – Gilead and Lila – it becomes the same story told with entirely different premises, one so dependent on history it can’t understand itself without it and the other so empty of history that it cannot initially find its bearings. Throw in the terrific ethical complications of Home, where we learn that Ames, while still deeply intent on being a good man, has not always managed to be the decent person his full faith calls him to be. (I’m giving Home short shrift; it’s as beautiful as the others, and it negotiates history more at the level of the family and the community rather than in the generational scope of Gilead or the narrowly personal of Lila.)

As if all that weren’t enough, Ames is such a staggering decent and ethical presence that he finds a way to enter into conversation with Lila in a way that is not condescending. In an America of Biblical literalists who claim direct access to the divine – and who have more or less successfully hijacked the mantle of the great mainline Protestant traditions that built so much of the American ethic – Ames comes across as almost too good to be true: a man whose deep self-doubt is only barely conquered by his even deeper religious faith.

He discovers a belated chance at happiness in his meeting with Lila, and he makes the most of it, redeeming her from the mystery of her childhood and the ignorance of history. He does so only slowly and imperfectly, and only through his inspiring patience and love. In all, he comes across as a latter day Protestant saint, one of those quiet and pious people unsullied by sanctimony, who, always rare, would be nearly unrecognizable in an America that treats religion as a checklist of socio-political positions or, worse, a badge of unassailable license to judge others.

There’s a greatness in Ames, and it rubs off on all who enter his orbit. He isn’t perfect, but the beauty of his faith is that he recognizes that sooner and more deeply than anyone else. I find Gilead and Lila together echoing one of my favorite novels of all time, Anthony Trollope’s The Warden, for the way it makes a good man’s faith something palpable in a world that can barely recognize it.

Bottom line, Robinson has really done it. If she isn’t the greatest American writer of the moment, then I don’t know who is. (Maybe, still, the very different Jonathan Lethem?)

I like good literature which often means feeling sad but

In this almost painfully beautiful novel, there is enough good, and enough love to make up for all of the pain and ugliness Lili experiences.