What A Book!

I was going to title this column, "What A Novel!" but realized I might lose some of you people. You see, it is intellectually fashionable to fill one's reading time with nonfiction. Fiction? That's escapist, right? Dime-store novels and boring old books from college lit classes. If you really want to learn about life, love, God, or whatever else it is that you have an interest in, read non-fiction, because it is true.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Good fiction is true in a way that nonfiction can rarely be. Now, I did not say it is real, I said true.
An illustration: I read an anecdote one time from a new mother. She read quite a few "how to care for your baby," "what to expect ..." kind of books. She picked up some valuable tidbits, but nothing really spoke to her. Then, by chance, she discovered a book of short fiction, where each story's protagonist was a new mother. She devoured the book, then read it again. Finally, something that spoke to her! The difficulties and resulting emotions of these fictional characters spoke to her in a way that the "real" books did not. This is the power of great fiction.
"Gilead" by Marilynne Robinson is great fiction. It is a finalist for this year's PEN/ Faulkner award; deservedly so. "Gilead" is told in the first person, from the point of view of an old minister, living in the 1950s, who is slowly dying of heart disease. Having been told that he only has months to live, he begins to write a memoir of his life, and that of his father and grandfather -- all ministers -- for his young son to read (after a long period as a widower when his first wife, and child, died in childbirth) he'd married a 30something woman several years previous, and she bore him his first-and-only son). Here is an excerpt:

I'd never have believed I'd see a wife of mine doting on a child of mine. It still amazes me every time I think of it. I'm writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you've done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God's grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you.

He does have the words. And what follows is a tale that resonates with truths of the human condition, the bonds (and the severe testing of those bonds) between fathers and sons, the call to action by a righteous God, love lost and won, and the testing of friendship. The tale spans three generations, from the violent history of pre-civil war era Kansas and the abolitionist struggle, to mid-century America.

Read this book, my peeps. B-Dog says, "Yes, you will read it and you will grow in wisdom -- wider, deeper, higher." And it's entertaining to boot.

That's all I have to say about that.