Lila

Lila Review

Lila is the third novel in Robinson’s Gilead sequence, but it is in important ways the most independent of them: it can be read without the others, and its concerns — poverty, dispossession, the question of what religious faith means to someone who has been abandoned by every human institution — are more socially urgent than the more insular theological preoccupations of Gilead and Home.

The novel alternates between Lila’s past — her childhood as a stolen infant raised by the drifter Doll, her years on the American roads in the Depression, her time in a St. Louis brothel — and her present in Gilead, where she has arrived by accident, sat down in the back of an old preacher’s church, and begun the improbable process of being loved by him. The two timelines are not kept neatly separate; Lila’s mind moves between them, and the novel’s structure mimics the way the past inhabits the present rather than preceding it.

The central theological question Lila poses — the question she asks Ames directly, and that the novel circles throughout — is what happens to the people who were simply not given a decent chance: Doll, who stole her out of love and raised her in poverty; the men and women who drifted through her childhood, working when they could and starving when they could not; the people for whom the conventional promises of religion were never available. Robinson does not offer a comforting answer. She sits with the question, which is the more honest response.

The romance between Lila and Ames is the warmest thing in the Gilead sequence — Robinson’s most openly affectionate writing — and it works because she refuses to make it simple. Lila does not understand why Ames loves her; she expects it to end, makes plans to leave, keeps the knife she has always carried. Her slow, watchful opening to the possibility of being cared for is the most psychologically precise portrait of what it means to have learned, very early, that trust is dangerous. Lila is Robinson at her most human and her most precise simultaneously, which is a difficult combination to achieve.

A Life Before Gilead

What distinguishes Lila within the Gilead sequence is how much of it takes place far from the small Iowa town that gives the series its name. Before Lila ever arrives in Gilead, she has lived an entire life on the margins of Depression-era America: a neglected child snatched from a porch by the drifter Doll, raised on the roads among migrant workers, schooled almost not at all, surviving through fieldwork, domestic labour, and eventually a period in a St. Louis brothel. Robinson renders this world of itinerant poverty with an unsentimental precision that makes Lila her most socially grounded novel. The hunger, the cold, the constant motion, the fierce and provisional loyalties of people who own nothing — all of it is recorded without melodrama and without the slightest condescension.

Doll, who steals Lila out of something like love and protects her with a knife when she has to, is one of Robinson’s most quietly remarkable creations. The bond between the two women — improvised, fierce, entirely outside any institution of church or family or law — becomes the novel’s implicit argument that grace is not the property of the respectable, and that the deepest forms of care can arise in places the world has written off entirely.

The Hardest Question in the Sequence

When Lila finally comes to Gilead and, almost against her own will, falls into the strange new life of being loved by the elderly Reverend Ames, the novel sharpens into its central theological confrontation. Lila has buried Doll and the people of her childhood, and she cannot accept a faith that would consign them to damnation simply because they were never given the chance to live decently or learn the right words. The question she puts to Ames — what becomes of the people the world abandoned, the ones who never had a fair beginning — is the hardest question the entire Gilead sequence asks, and Robinson, to her enormous credit, refuses to resolve it with a tidy answer. She lets it stand, unanswered, which is the more honest and the more devastating choice.

Robinson’s reading of the Book of Ezekiel, and especially the passage about the infant left exposed in a field and taken up and made to live, runs through the novel as a counter-text to Lila’s despair — an image of a God who claims the abandoned rather than discarding them. The theology is woven so closely into Lila’s consciousness that it never feels imposed; it emerges from her own struggle to understand whether the love she has stumbled into can be trusted.

Love as Attention

The romance between Lila and Ames is the warmest writing in the sequence and one of the most moving portraits of late-life love in contemporary fiction. It works because Robinson refuses to make it easy. Lila keeps her knife, keeps planning to leave, keeps expecting the comfort to be withdrawn — because everything in her life has taught her that trust is a danger. Her slow, watchful opening to the possibility of being cared for is rendered with a psychological precision that feels wholly earned. For Robinson, love is finally a form of attention, and Ames’s love for Lila is expressed as patient, unhurried seeing. Lila won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and it stands as perhaps the most independently readable and most humanly accessible of the Gilead novels.