""Home" is a companion piece to "Gilead," an account of the same time (the summer of 1956), in the same place (Gilead, Iowa), with the same cast of characters as the earlier novel. Each book is strengthened and deepened by a reading of the other . . . The two books, different in their form and approach as well as in the details they reveal and the stories they ultimately tell, are an enactment of humanity's broader dance of ever-attempted, ever-failing communication--through a glass darkly. This is not, of itself, a novel endeavor for the novel (Edith Wharton once wrote, with lyrical concise wit, 'I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story'); rather it is the gravitas and patience with which Robinson, whose 1998 book of essays "The Death of Adam" revealed her rigorous Christian spiritual inquiry, has, in these two novels, channeled that rigor in fictional form; the result is two works of art of impressively unfashionable seriousness and engagement . . . Robinson, throughout "Home," is tackling almost the opposite of what she undertook in "Gilead": rather than granting a direct and illuminated voice to a single, thoughtful soul, she stands back--writing in the third person, albeit in a third person that privileges Glory's point of view--and allows her characters to perform their small daily rituals, to have their conversations, to live through their misunderstandings, each in his or her particular isolation. Crucially, she allows at least very distinct experiences--that of the devout, to which John Ames, Robert Boughton, and even Glory could be said to belong; and Jack's secular universe--to interact with one another, each with its own language and its own jurisprudence . . . What is remarkable about "Home"--and why it is, to this reader, an even stronger accomplishment than its companion volume; not in spite of its longueurs and its repetitiveness but because of them--is that it is both a spiritual and a mundane accounting."--Claire Messud, "The New York Review of Books
""Home is a book full of doubleness and paradox, at once serene and volcanic, ruthless and forgiving. It is an anguished pastoral, a tableau of decency and compassion that is also an angry and devastating indictment of moral cowardice and unrepentant, unacknowledged sin. It would be inaccurate to say that the novel represents yet another breathless expose of religious hypocrisy, or a further excavation of the dark secrets that supposedly lurk beneath the placid surface of small-town life. When Robinson writes that 'complacency was consistent with the customs and manners of Presbyterian Gilead and was therefore assumed to be justified in every case, ' she is not scoring an easy, sarcastic point. There is real kindness and generosity in the town, and its theological disposition is accordingly tolerant and charitable . . . Readers who come to "Home" after "Gilead" will know that during his 20-year exile Jack met a black woman and had a child with her. His return to Gilead is in part a reconnaissance mission, an attempt to discover if the town might be a suitable home for a mixed-race family. In 1956, there are 'no colored people in Gilead, ' but it has not always been that way. They left after their church was burned, even though Ames remembers the arson as 'a little nuisance fire' that happened long ago. And Ames's 'shabby old town' is a place where a black family is afraid to be out on the road when the sun goes down. These ugly facts complicate the beauty of "Home," but the way Robinson embeds them in the novel is part of what makes it so beautiful. It is a book unsparing in its acknowl