Any novel whose narrator and central character is my own age certainly gets my attention. That’s the way it was reading Gilead, the beautiful new book written by Marilynne Robinson. I consider it the most satisfying piece of fiction that has come my way in many years.

The author already had a fine reputation with the critics. They loved her first novel, Housekeeping. But that appeared in 1981 and she had published no other novels till this past year. Gilead thus rates as a literary event in itself; beyond that, it offers valuable insights into aging and spirituality, two subjects dear to me.

The 76-year-old narrator is John Ames, a Congregationalist minister who lives in rural Iowa in 1956. Both his father and grandfather were also ministers, each quite different from the other. The elder Ames was a Civil War veteran with a missing eye to prove it, while his son─the narrator’s father─debunked that war and all others.

The novel does not come with individual chapters but takes the shape of one long letter that John Ames, at the request of his wife, addresses to their six-year-old son. It is a testament that will inform the boy about his father’s life and character, after the latter’s death. John feels that death to be imminent, following his doctor’s diagnosis of angina pectoris.

“I do hope to die with a quiet heart,” he says of his spiritual preparedness for that event. About the place which became his home two years after his birth in 1880 and where he expects to die, he turns eloquent: “I love this town. I think sometimes of going into the ground here as a last wild gesture of love.”

Reverend Ames appreciates the woman, Lila, who wanted to marry him despite his being 35 years older than she. And having a son in his old age also means everything to him: “The children of old age are unspeakably precious,” he states. As one who became a parent only after 50, I can give a ringing endorsement to this sentiment.

Though he is prepared for death, he does not feel all that positive about old age. “I don’t want to be old,” he explains to his son. “I don’t want to be the tremulous coot you barely remember.”

Using a reference to baseball (a sport he loves, even to the extent of watching a Red Sox/Yankees game on television), John envisions what his body will be like in the next life. “I imagine a kind of ecstatic pirouette, a little bit like going up for a line drive when you’re so young that your body almost doesn’t know about effort.”

Belief in God is central in his life and his preaching of the word gives expression to that faith. His attachment to church, extends to the physical building where his congregation meets. He loves to slip away from his house at night when he cannot sleep, sit in one of the pews, and pray while allowing himself to fall peacefully asleep.

What he calls “the deep things of man” have become his familiars through the practice of his ministry. He speaks about “grace as a sort of ecstatic fire that takes things down to essentials.” I find touching the relish he feels for the rites of religion as he reaches out to God and the people whom he serves.

Of spiritual bravery he speaks with further eloquence: “To acknowledge that there is more beauty that our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm.”

Ames’s closest friend is a fellow minister and age peer, a man identified only as “Boughton.” Their relationship brings much support to John but also has become the source of complication. His friend’s son, John Ames Boughton, now in his 30s, has led a checkered life that troubles both his father and the man for whom he is named.

When the younger Boughton returns to Gilead and seeks counsel from Reverend Ames, the latter feels turmoil and must wrestle with conflicting emotions. His working out of these issues ushers the minister into another stage of spiritual development.

The author brings to this novel, not only a creative talent for entering into the life of a man in old age (at least, as people used to think of it), but a sensitive understanding of religion and ministry. Insights abound but they do not impede the smoothly flowing narrative letter that John Ames writes for his son.

Marilynne Robinson is an artist who, among much else, evokes a sense of place, remote from my own. And yet, she makes me feel a kinship with this Iowa minister, a man approaching the end of his life with faith in God and love for the people God has given him.

Richard Griffin