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From the Gilead series , Vol. 3

by Marilynne Robinson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 7, 2014

Fans of Robinson will wish the book were longer—and will surely look forward to the next.

More balm in Gilead as Robinson ( When I Was a Child I Read Books , 2012, etc.) returns to familiar ground to continue the saga ofJohn Amesand his neighbors.

Ames, Robinson’s readers will know, is a minister in the hamlet of Gilead, a quiet place in a quiet corner of a quiet Midwestern state. Deceptively quiet, we should say, for Robinson, ever the Calvinist (albeit a gentle and compassionate one), is a master at plumbing the roiling depths below calm surfaces. In this installment, she turns to the title character, Ames’ wife, who has figured mostly just in passing in  Gilead  (2004) and  Home (2008). How, after all, did this young outsider wind up in a place so far away from the orbits of most people? What secrets does she bear? It turns out that Lila has quite a story to tell, one of abandonment, want, struggle and redemption—classic Robinson territory, in other words. Robinson provides Lila with enough back story to fuel several other books, her prose richly suggestive and poetic as she evokes a bygone time before “everyone…started getting poorer and the wind turned dirty” that merges into a more recent past that seems no less bleak, when Lila, having subsisted on cattails and pine sap, wanders into Gilead just to look at the houses and gardens: “The loneliness was bad, but it was better than anything else she could think of.” She never leaves, of course, becoming part of the landscape—and, as readers will learn, essential to the gradually unfolding story of Gilead. And in Robinson’s hands, that small town, with its heat and cicadas, its tree toads and morning dew, becomes as real as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, just as charged with meaning if a touch less ominous, Lila’s talismanic knife notwithstanding.   

Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-374-18761-3

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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PERSPECTIVES

THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

SEEN & HEARD

WE WERE THE LUCKY ONES

by Georgia Hunter ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 14, 2017

Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.

Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.

Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “ You’ll get only one shot at this ,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “ Don’t botch it .” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “ That form is a deal breaker ,” he tells himself. “ It’s life and death .” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.

Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016

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Reviews of Lila by Marilynne Robinson

Summary | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio

by Marilynne Robinson

Critics' Opinion:

Readers' Opinion:

• Literary Fiction
• Midwest, USA
• Minn. Wis. Iowa
• 20th Century (multiple decades)
• Contemporary
• Mid-Life Onwards
• Strong Women
• Philosophical
• Religious or Spiritual Themes

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About this Book

• Reading Guide

Book Summary

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.

Excerpt Lila

The child was just there on the stoop in the dark, hugging herself against the cold, all cried out and nearly sleeping. She couldn't holler anymore and they didn't hear her anyway, or they might and that would make things worse. Somebody had shouted, Shut that thing up or I'll do it! and then a woman grabbed her out from under the table by her arm and pushed her out onto the stoop and shut the door and the cats went under the house. They wouldn't let her near them anymore because she picked them up by their tails sometimes. Her arms were all over scratches, and the scratches stung. She had crawled under the house to find the cats, but even when she did catch one in her hands it struggled harder the harder she held on to it and it bit her, so she let it go. Why you keep pounding at the screen door? Nobody gonna want you around if you act like that. And then the door closed again, and after a while night came. The people inside fought themselves quiet, ...

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

• The novel's opening paragraphs vividly capture the deprivations experienced by young Lila. How do these experiences affect her immersion in the culture of Gilead? As she reaches adulthood, what does Lila believe about the nature of life?
• How did your perception of Doll shift throughout the novel? What motivates her to rescue Lila? What do the two girls teach each other about loyalty and its limitations?
• Lila recalls the day she ventured into John Ames's candlelit church (echoing Ames's tender recollection of that scene, which was presented in Gilead ). Doane had told Lila, "Churches just want your money," yet she needed refuge. What does Ames's church want from Lila?
• As she copies difficult passages from the Bible,...
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National Book Critics Circle Awards 2014

Media Reviews

Reader reviews, bookbrowse review.

In contrast to many novels, Lila is quiet and contemplative, deeply profound, filled with universal, ethical and philosophical questions about the nature of existence that thoughtful readers will relate to: why are we here, does life have meaning and purpose? I recommend it to thoughtful readers who like their novels deep and emotionally rich... continued

Full Review (927 words) This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access, become a member today .

(Reviewed by Sharry Wright ).

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Beyond the Book

Child abandonment syndrome.

Throughout the novel, Lila , the protagonist suffers a deep ongoing shame resulting from early childhood abuse and neglect. Although it is never articulated in the story, there is a name for this response: Child Abandonment Syndrome. In a 2010 article published in a blog, "The Many Faces of Addiction," for Psychology Today , Claudia Black, M.S.W., Ph. D., states that children who live without the psychological or physical protection they need, internalize incredible fear. Without the physical conditions necessary to thrive— appropriate supervision, the provision of nutrition and meals, and/or adequate clothing, housing, heat or shelter—a child experiences abandonment. According to Black, living with repeated abandonment ...

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Read-Alikes

• Genres & Themes

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About this book

A luminous debut novel about two young couples whose lives become intertwined when the husbands are appointed co-ministers of a venerable New York City church in the 1960s, spanning decades - for readers of Ann Patchett and Nicole Krauss.

Clock Dance

by Anne Tyler

Published 2019

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A delightful novel of one woman's transformative journey, from the best-selling and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer.

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Book Review: Marilynne Robinson’s “Lila” — A Vision of Life More Damned Than Redeemed

Lila is an ambitious book that is deeply flawed and not nearly in the same class as Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead.

Lila by Marilynne Robinson, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 272 pages, $26.

By Roberta Silman

I guess it is only fair to begin way back in the early 1980s. Although everyone I knew was raving about Marilynne Robinson’s debut novel Housekeeping and although an English friend was the film editor of the subsequent movie, I have always felt like odd man out regarding that highly touted book. For me there were no tingles in it, I felt it was contrived, and the language did not blow me away. This was no Flannery O’Connor, or Elizabeth Bowen. Indeed, I found the experience of reading Housekeeping somewhat like eating a too-rich Thanksgiving stuffing.

I missed Home when it appeared after a long hiatus, but was interested in Gilead and, having just re-read it, I agree that it deserved the Pulitzer Prize. It has a real voice and sweep, reminding me of one of my favorite writers, Willa Cather, and the first person narrator, John Ames, who at seventy-seven in 1956 is writing a long, novel length letter to his seven-year-old son, is entirely believable and affecting. Like his grandfather, an abolitionist who came to preach anti-slavery in the west and landed in a small town in Iowa, Ames is a preacher, and has a profound understanding of both the Old and New Testaments; his eloquence has a biblical ring; the story has historical reverberations that go back to the Civil War; and the language is beautiful, direct, tender, and filled with humility and humor.

So I turned to Lila with great anticipation. This a “prequel” to Gilead , the story of the young wife who came into John Ames’s life when he was sixty-seven and the mother of his child. And once again, I seem to be in the minority. In the last twenty-four hours I see that Lila has been nominated for the National Book award, and I have read Michiko Kakutani’s review in The New York Times — not exactly a rave, but respectful — and also Leslie Jamison’s and Joan Acocella’s highly laudatory reviews in the current Atlantic and New Yorker .

But for me Lila is an ambitious book that is deeply flawed and not nearly in the same class as the earlier work, Gilead . First of all, Robinson has written it in the third person, so this strange woman, who was abandoned as a young child and rescued by a woman named Doll, seems, for most of the book, to be a helpless, often dour victim who is observed at a distance. If she were telling her own story, we might have felt more intimacy with her, and while we respect her loyalty to Doll, the older woman never really becomes “round” enough, in Forster’s terms. And second, the structure of the book is confusing and lacks any kind of real narrative drive. Most of the novel takes place when Lila is already married and pregnant, and all else is revealed as memory, sometimes in conversations, sometimes in thought. So while there are some nice scenes, this is by no means a great novel. It isn’t even a really good novel because, Robinson’s language fails her when her story falters. And since Lila’s story is broken up into little bits and pieces of thought and odd flashbacks, the prose never achieves the beauty nor breadth of Gilead .

Moreover, Lila’s early life with Doll and the other street people becomes unbelievably repetitious, which is a shame, because in the last third when Lila is on her own and ends up in a whorehouse in St. Louis, she becomes a lot more interesting. You understand why she is so disillusioned, and the conversation she has with Ames soon after they get to know each other, makes more sense. Here they are after she has wandered into his church and they are getting to know each other and she is discouraged and thinking about hitting the road again:

She said, “I guess I’m tired.” Yes, well—” and he put his arms around her, very carefully, very gently. With her head still resting on his shoulder she said, “I just can’t trust you at all.” He laughed, a soft sound at her ear, a breath. She started to pull away, but he put his hand on her hair so she rested her head again. He said, “Is there anything I can do about that?” And she said, “Nothing I can think of. I don’t trust nobody.” He said, “No wonder you’re tired.”

After they marry, at her suggestion, you see them struggling to adjust to their new state, but as soon as you get interested in these two very oddly matched people, he always afraid she might leave, and she learning to speak and read better by copying passages of the Old Testament (first Ezekiel and then Job), Robinson throws in more of the past and we are back in Lila’s fevered memory, going over the travails of her and Doll, which are reminiscent of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath , but with none of the patience and poetry of that great book.

Marilynne Robinson — struggling to lift what could have been a very good novel into the realm of myth.

And although Lila asks important questions about what matters in life and although by the end of the book Lila has changed in unexpected ways, she is always a victim, the pull of the past exerting itself on her and threatening to overwhelm her. In a sense, it is the vividness of childhood, even a childhood filled with poverty and a deep loneliness, that wins out. But the way Robinson tells it, you see her struggling to lift what could have been a very good novel into the realm of myth, especially when she keeps coming back to the water imagery and the metaphor of baptism. And at times I felt that Robinson was stubbornly undercutting the narrative in her insistence on proffering a vision of life that is more damned than redeemed. It may be her Protestant bias, but for this reader, it doesn’t quite work. Here is Lila at the end:

Oh, if the old man knew what thoughts she had! She could make a pretty good meat loaf now and a decent potato salad. He told her he never liked pie very much anyway. She could keep the house nice enough. People passing in the road stopped to admire her gardens. The boy was as clean and pretty as any baby in Gilead. A little small, but that would change. And the old man did look as though every blessing he had forgotten to hope for had descended on him all at once, for the time being.

She couldn’t lean her whole weight on any of this when she knew she would have to live on after it. She wouldn’t even want to see this house again after they had left it, or Gilead, at least till the boy had outgrown the thought that they belonged there. So she thought about the old life. She never really hated it until Doll came to her all bloody and she went to St. Louis. But it was a hard way to bring up a child. And she would tell him he was a minister’s son, so he might blame her because she couldn’t give him what his father would have given him, the quiet gentleness in his manners, the way of expecting that people would look up to him. She surely couldn’t teach him that. . . . So one morning, standing at the sink washing the dishes, she said, “I guess there’s something the matter with me, old man. I can’t love you as much as I love you. I can’t feel as happy as I am.”

“I know,” he said. “”I don’t think it’s anything to worry about. I don’t worry about it, really.” “I got so much life behind me.” “I know.” “It was nothing like this life.” “I know.” “I miss it sometimes.” He nodded. “We aren’t so different. There are things I miss.” She said, “I might have to go back to it sometime. The part I could go back to, what with the child.” It it not up to any critic to tell a writer how they should have written a novel, but as I read, I found myself longing for Robinson to tell the story in a simpler way, perhaps more chronologically, and certainly in a way that trusted itself enough not to jump around so much, perhaps framed by the present story — the waiting for the child. With less pretension and groping for a “deeper meaning.” Or, it may be that I was longing for a more courageous editor. And therein lies part of the problem. Based on a small amount of fiction, Robinson has achieved a huge reputation and my guess is she is rarely questioned or criticized by her first readers. How very sad. When I closed this sometimes poignant book, I could only feel regret that it isn’t better than it is.

Roberta Silman is the author of a story collection, Blood Relations , now available as an ebook, three novels, Boundaries , The Dream Dredger , and Beginning the World Again , and a children’s book, Somebody Else’s Child . A recipient of Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, she has published reviews in The New York Times and The Boston Globe , and writes regularly for Arts Fuse . She can be reached at [email protected].

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Lila by Marilynne Robinson, book review: A sumptuous, graceful, and ultimately life-affirming novel

Her characters, raised on differently seasoned diets of poverty, solitude and death, are constantly alive to suffering, but the best ones perceive this as sometimes leading towards bliss, article bookmarked.

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“She knew a little bit about existence. That was pretty well the only thing she knew about, and she had learned the word for it from him.”

Lila, the fourth novel by Marilynne Robinson, suggests that you don’t necessarily need a broad canvas to be a great writer; you just need to be very good at homing in on the small details.

The story emerges from gaps and silences in Robinson’s last two interconnected books, Gilead and Home . Set in the small Iowan town of Gilead, those novels traced the lives of Calvinist preachers John Ames and Robert Broughton respectively: their friendship, their trials, and their consolations. For 67-year-old John Ames, one late, but life-changing consolation was meeting and marrying Lila herself: it is their son, Richard, to whom Gilead is narrated in the form of a meditative letter.

As its title hints, Lila recalls these events but from a rather different point of view. Whereas Ames lives his entire life in one place, Lila travels restlessly, desperate to find whatever work she can. Where Ames engages with national and international events, Lila is surprised to learn that the landscape she knows so intimately is called “the United States of America”. Where Ames is intellectually eloquent, Lila is all instinctive silence. And where Ames has a stable familial and spiritual identity he can return to when wracked by doubts, Lila’s self-reliance is the result of continual flux and uncertainty.

Even her name is a fiction, invented by her de facto mother Doll, whose rescue-cum-abduction of Lila opens the novel. We are shown a child, neglected to the point of abuse, “miserable as could be”: “She couldn’t holler anymore and they didn’t hear her anyway, or they might and that would make things worse.”

Doll’s act of mercy gives Lila its primary drama: the family will pursue the pair more for prideful vengeance than any desire to recover the girl. But it also sets in motion Lila’s defining contradictions. It proves characteristic that her salvation is both a blessing (she was unlikely to survive her birth-parents’ cruelty) and a curse, beginning a fundamental alienation: “But if you’re a stranger to everybody on earth, then that’s what you are and there’s no end to it. You don’t know the words to say,” Lila thinks.

Lila’s peripatetic wanderings through the Depression-era dustbowl are entwined with her tentative relationship with John Ames. The nomadic sections have something of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road about them – the sacred tinges to the language, the pared-down wonder and sudden bursts of violent “ferociousness” (to use Lila’s word). There are rag-tag characters, alternately beneficent and threatening, and a central, intimate relationship between parent and child.

Yet Lila’s voice is, if anything, purer and less sentimental than McCarthy’s in its cool depiction of hardships. What breaks the heart is the yearning pathos of her endurance: “Hunger and loneliness and weariness and still wanting more of it. Existence. Why do I bother?”

Why humans bother is one of Robinson’s primary preoccupations. Her characters, raised on differently seasoned diets of poverty, solitude and death, are constantly alive to suffering, but the best ones perceive this as sometimes leading towards bliss. For Lila herself, this means reconciling her cheerless past – which ends in a dismal St Louis brothel – with the possibility of happiness with John Ames: “I got so much life behind me,” she says evenly. The choice is not an easy one for the self-protective Lila. “That was loneliness. When you’re scalded, touch hurts, it makes no difference if it’s kindly meant.”For Lila, the hope embodied by Ames, like that provided by Doll’s rescue, challenges her deepest sense of self: “But she kept thinking, What happens when somebody isn’t herself anymore …”

Robinson’s tough questions inspire tough answers. Even after Lila proposes marriage, she doesn’t settle down so much as pause, ready to leave at a second’s notice. “And what would she do without him. What would she do”, sounds bereft and animated all at once.

And yet, Lila manages to be a sumptuous, graceful, and ultimately life-affirming novel that earns the muted, but convincing happiness of its concluding pages: “And here were the two of them together in this warm light, the same dread feeding on the same hope, married.” This is typical of the way Robinson’s elegantly crafted prose weighs difficult and even contradictory ideas and feelings. There is the perfectly paced sentence that describes time’s surreptitious progress: “There was the clock ticking, steady as could be, and time passing, and no sign of anything else happening at all, but then in two days there would be the shadow of dust again, anywhere you happened to look for it.”

Lila even says “I love you” without cliché: “I can’t love you as much as I love you. I can’t feel as happy as I am.” Somehow these simple words express her triumph over loneliness and her persistent vulnerability to it. “All that beautiful life,” Ames ponders near the end without sounding glib. It just goes to show. Knowing a little about existence can go a long way.

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The Book We're Talking About: 'Lila' By Marilynne Robinson

Books and Culture Writer, HuffPost

Lila by Marilynne Robinson Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26.00 Published Oct. 7, 2014

The Book We're Talking About is a weekly review combining plot description and analysis with fun tidbits about the book.

A poetic, bittersweet meditation on faith, family, and belonging, Lila embraces the depths of human doubt and misery while uncovering hope through the power of grace. Marilynne Robinson’s latest novel is dedicated simply, and perfectly, “To Iowa.” She lives in Iowa, where she teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the new book, Lila , is the third of her novels she’s set in the small fictional town of Gilead, Iowa. The land has been rich literary terrain for her; Robinson even remarked recently that “Gilead voices are still simmering” in her mind: “If one of them demands its book, I may well write it.”

In Lila , we learn the story of the young wife of Reverend John Ames, whose voice we heard in the pages of Robinson’s novel Gilead . The titular Lila, Ames's wife and the mother of his young son, was a beloved but elusive figure in Gilead. The light of her husband’s life but mostly impenetrable to him, now her secrets are thrown open to us -- her abandonment as a toddler by her parents, her rescue by a drifter named Doll, her upbringing as a wandering laborer, her stint in a brothel in St. Louis. In Gilead , Lila seemed aloof but steady, but in her story we see the full depths of her conflicted fear of domesticity, of love, of family. We know she will stay with Ames, but we see, for the first time, what a determined struggle it was not to walk out the door, back to the itinerant life she’d always known.

In her three previous novels, Housekeeping , Gilead , and Home , Robinson has shown a profound insight into the ways of the faithful and the ways of the wanderer. In Lila , she winds these threads together more closely than she ever has before. Like restless aunt Sylvie in Housekeeping , Lila seems to comprehend no way of being but disconnection, drifting, loneliness -- though her love for her guardian, Doll, was all the more fervent for its being the only meaningful constant in her young life. But it’s clear her marriage to the preacher John Ames was no accident or manipulation; she also aches for the comforts that come with family and church -- belonging, warmth, and above all, understanding of her life and the lives of those she loves.

Robinson often receives praise for her treatment of religious faith in the field of literary fiction, where it is increasingly rarely seen. Her depiction of a questioning drifter seeking -- and yet resisting -- meaning in her life allows her to show the full range of her gifts in this arena. Never didactic or heavy-handed, Lila instead contains an honest, deeply nuanced, and unflinching exploration of what Christian faith might represent, both in hope and in fear, to a woman with Lila’s dark and troubled past.

Told in Lila’s own voice, the narrative finds the poetic juncture between her uneducated speech -- she claims at one point to have not known the word “existence” -- and Robinson’s acutely observed and measured prose, resulting in a voice, and a novel, both believable and achingly beautiful.

What other reviewers think: The New York Times : "Writing in lovely, angular prose that has the high loneliness of an old bluegrass tune, Ms. Robinson has created a balladlike story about two lost people who, after years of stoic solitariness, unexpectedly find love -- not the sudden, transformative passion of romantic movies and novels but a hard-won trust and tenderness that grow slowly over time."

The New Yorker : "Life without comfort, without love, that is the real life, and Lila would like to understand why. This is an unflinching book."

Who wrote it? Marilynne Robinson has written four novels, including Housekeeping , Home , and Gilead , which won the Pulitzer Prize. Lila has been named as a finalist for the National Book Awards. She has also written four nonfiction titles. Robinson is a professor at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Who will read it? Readers who prefer fiction with religious, especially Christian, themes and spiritual journeys, as well as those who admire finely crafted literary prose.

Opening lines: “The child was just there on the stoop in the dark, hugging herself against the cold, all cried out and nearly sleeping. She couldn’t holler anymore and they didn’t hear her anyway, or they might and that would make things worse. Somebody shouted, Shut that thing up or I’ll do it! and then a woman grabbed her out from under the table by her arm and pushed her out onto the stoop and shut the door and the cats went under the house.”

Notable passage: “I am baptized, I am married, I am Lila Dahl, and Lila Ames. I don’t know what else I should want. Except for the shame to be gone, and it ain’t. I’m in a strange house with a man who can’t even figure out how to talk to me. Anything I could do around here has been done already. If I say something ignorant or crazy he’ll start thinking, Old men can be foolish. He’s thought it already. He’ll ask me to leave and no one will blame him. I won’t blame him. Marriage was supposed to put an end to these miseries. But now whatever happens everybody will know. She saw him standing in the parlor with his beautiful old head bowed down on his beautiful old chest. She thought, He sure better be praying. And then she thought, Praying looks just like grief. Like shame. Like regret.”

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Lila, by Marilynne Robinson: Review

Philip Marchand reviews Marilynne Robinson’s Lila, her latest ‘profoundly soulful’ novel.

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The Book of Ezekiel is one of the strangest books in the Bible, full of wild poetry and visions of God so weird and overpowering that a school of Biblical criticism maintains its author was deranged.

Lila, by Marilynne Robinson: Review Back to video

An old preacher named John Ames in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Lila does not share this view of the Jewish prophet but is hesitant when a woman unfamiliar with the Bible starts reading Ezekiel. It’s a “hard” book, he warns — hard to understand, hard to digest. But Robinson knows what she’s doing.

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These days the kind of reader who would tackle Lila , a sophisticated literary fiction, is likely as ignorant of the Bible as the barely schooled woman of the book’s title — and one of Marilynne Robinson’s aims is to introduce those readers to a far more stringent, emotionally raw and profoundly soulful atmosphere than people are generally used to when they talk about “spirituality.”

The old preacher living in the Iowa town of Gilead — the character and the location will be familiar to readers of Robinson’s previous novel, Gilead — happens to be a saint. “Maybe the kindest man in the world,” according to Lila. No writer can depict a saint without straying at least a little bit into Ezekiel territory, with its air of profound mystery, especially the mystery of God’s mercy. In Canadian literature I can think only of David Adams Richards as a novelist brave enough to depict a man in pursuit of sanctity. Robinson’s task is especially difficult given that Robinson’s saint is a small town Calvinist preacher, not a type normally portrayed with sympathy by filmmakers or television writers.

It does help that the book is narrated not from his point of view but mostly from that of Lila, a girl of mysterious origins — at the outset of the novel she is living as a four-or- five-year-old with a rag tag group in the rural Midwest who may or may not be her kinfolk. “The spindliest damn child I ever saw,” one character comments. She is saved by a woman named Doll who displays saint-like devotion to Lila by snatching her away from probable death by starvation and negligence.

At first, Doll and Lila, fearful that the people she was snatched away from will try to find her, roam the countryside as a pair. “Doll may have been the loneliest woman in the world,” Robinson writes, “and Lila was the loneliest child, and there they were, the two of them together, keeping each other warm in the rain.” Eventually, however, they join a band of itinerant field workers headed by a man named Doane.

The two remain dirt poor, but they have food to eat and Lila even enjoys a certain camaraderie with other girls in the band. Doane prides himself on keeping his informal family together — they are not tramps but industrious, honest, well-behaved workers. One of the saddest and most harrowing episodes is the slow disintegration of Doane’s band under the pressure of the Great Depression and the dust bowl. Work becomes harder and harder to find, and Doane’s pride in providing for his band withers away, until finally he is caught stealing and sentenced to jail.

Doll, meanwhile, has her own brush with the law, killing a man that may have been one of Lila’s original “family,” The murder weapon, a knife, is passed on to Lila as her only legacy from Doll—a symbol of Lila’s own resourcefulness, and the physical means by which she preserves her integrity. “That knife was the difference between her and anybody else in the world,” Robinson writes. Not even the Bible can match it for potency. “I’m keeping that knife,” Lila declares. “It ain’t very Christian of me. Such a mean old knife.”

There are other episodes involving Lila, chiefly a brief period spent in a St. Louis brothel, a horrible, disgusting, prison-like environment that makes field work seem like paradise. In order to lend urgency and emotional depth to the central act of the narrative — Lila’s stumbling into John Ames’s church seeking shelter from the rain, followed some time later by their unlikely marriage — the heroine must indeed undergo horrific trials. It’s an old storyteller’s trick.

Lila emerges from her ordeals a damaged soul, who can barely bring herself to accept the love of her husband from shame at her ignorance and a general feeling of worthlessness. She is, after all, an orphan, and therefore, as one girl in Doane’s band puts it, somebody who “sort of turned out wrong.” Can she overcome her loneliness? For that matter can Ames, a widower who’s “had his share of loneliness,” according to Lila’s discerning eye, deal with his own doubts?

One difference between the two is that Ames has recourse to his Bible — but that doesn’t make any easier his attempt to “think of a way to speak to her,” Robinson writes. At least he offers no platitudes, no glib assurances, in his reply to her questions — age-old questions — about God’s allowing his human creatures to suffer. “Life is a very deep mystery,” Ames tells Lila, “and finally the grace of God is all that can resolve it.” Meanwhile loneliness seems to be ingrained in us — ingrained even in our fallen world. Lila at one point perceives that the wind “is tired of its huge loneliness.” Lila and her husband are also tired of their loneliness. “I can’t love you as much as I love you,” Lila cries, confessing her aloneness.

Lila is not an easy book to comprehend. The prose is never deliberately obscure but it requires careful reading and re-reading to determine what refers to whom. The examination of characters’ thoughts is nuanced and subtle, and the shifting of time scenes is complex. But the narrative basis is solid, the sentiments deeply felt, and the prose, reflecting this depth and sincerity, is at times beautifully resonant.

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Lila (Oprah's Book Club): A Novel (Paperback)

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A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK "Marilynne Robinson's LILA is an enthralling meditation on belief, suffering and grace." —O, the Oprah Magazine "Writing in lovely, angular prose that has the high loneliness of an old bluegrass tune, Ms. Robinson has created a balladlike story . . . The novel is powerful and deeply affecting . . . Ms. Robinson renders [Lila's] tale with the stark poetry of Edward Hopper or Andrew Wyeth. — The New York Times Grade: A Emotionally and intellectually challenging, it's an exploration of faith in God, love, and whatever else it takes to survive.” — Entertainment Weekly A new American classic from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gilead, Marilynne Robinson returns to the town of Gilead in an unforgettable story of a girlhood lived on the fringes of society in fear, awe, and wonder. 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.

• Fiction / Literary
• Fiction / World Literature / American / 21st Century

“Writing in lovely, angular prose that has the high loneliness of an old bluegrass tune, Ms. Robinson has created a balladlike story . . . The novel is powerful and deeply affecting . . . Ms. Robinson renders [Lila's] tale with the stark poetry of Edward Hopper or Andrew Wyeth.” — Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times “ 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 “My message is simple. Even if you haven't found the two previous books to your taste, give Lila a try . . . what we get . . . is the highest fictional magic: a character who seems so real, it's hard to remember that she exists only in the page of this book.” — John Wilson, Chicago Tribune “ Lila , Marilynne Robinson's remarkable new novel, stands alone as a book to read and even read again. It's both a multilayered love story and a perceptive look at how early deprivation causes lasting damage . . . Robinson is a novelist of the first order.” — Ellen Heltzel, The Seattle Times “ Grade: A Emotionally and intellectually challenging, it's an exploration of faith in God, love, and whatever else it takes to survive.” — Entertainment Weekly “Gorgeous writing, an absolutely beautiful book . . . This should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Robinson, a novelist who can make the most quotidian moments epic because of her ability to peel back the surfaces of ordinary lives . . . [a] profound and deeply rendered novel.” — David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times “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 “Marilynne Robinson tracks the movements of grace as if it were a wild animal, appearing for fleeting intervals and then disappearing past the range of vision, emerging again where we least expect to find it. Her novels are interested in what makes grace necessary at all--shame and its afterlife, loss and its residue, the limits and betrayals of intimacy. In Lila , her brilliant and deeply affecting new novel, even her description of sunlight in a St. Louis bordello holds a kind of heartbreak.” — Leslie Jamison, The Atlantic “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 “In her new novel, Lila , Marilynne Robinson has written a deeply romantic love story embodied in the language and ideas of Calvinist doctrine. She really is not like any other writer. She really isn't . . . Robinson has created a small, rich and fearless body of work in which religion exists unashamedly, as does doubt, unashamedly.” — Cathleen Schine, The New York Review of Books “Robinson's genius is for making indistinguishable the highest ends of faith and fiction . . . The beauty of Robinson's prose suggests an author continually threading with spun platinum the world's finest needle.” — Michelle Orange, Bookforum “The protagonist of the stunning Lila is as lost a character as can be found in literature . . . Don't hesitate to read Lila . . . It's a novel that stands on its own and is surely one of the best of the year.” — Holly Silva, St Louis Post-Dispatch “Existence and 'all the great storms that rise in it' are at the heart of Marilynne Robinson's glorious new novel, Lila . . . Lila is -- at once -- powerful, profound, and positively radiant in its depiction of its namesake, a child reared by drifters who finds a kindred soul in 'a big, silvery old man,' the Rev. John Ames . . . Life, death, joy, fear, doubt, love, violence, kindness -- all of this, and more, dwells in Lila , a book, I will venture, already for the ages, its protagonist engraved upon our souls.” — Karen Brady, The Buffalo News “ Lila is a dark, powerful, uplifting, unforgettable novel. And Robinson's Gilead trilogy -- Gilead , Home , and Lila -- is a great achievement in American fiction.” — Bryan Wooley, Dallas Morning News “ Starred Review This third of three novels set in the fictional plains town of Gilead, Iowa, is a masterpiece of prose in the service of the moral seriousness that distinguishes Robinson's work . . . Lila is a superb creation. Largely uneducated, almost feral, Lila has a thirst for stability and knowledge." — Publishers Weekly “ Starred Review Robinson has created a tour de force, an unforgettably dynamic odyssey, a passionate and learned moral and spiritual inquiry, a paean to the earth, and a witty and transcendent love story--all within a refulgent and resounding novel so beautifully precise and cadenced it wholly tranfixes and transforms us.” — Donna Seaman, Booklist “ Starred Review This is a lovely and touching story that grapples with the universal question of how God can allow his children to suffer. Recommended for fans of Robinson as well as those who enjoyed Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge , another exploration of pain and loneliness set against the backdrop of a small town.” — Evelyn Beck, Library 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

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The Sweet Linearity of “My Brilliant Friend”

By Emily Nussbaum

In one of the loveliest sequences in Elena Ferrante’s novel “ My Brilliant Friend ,” two girls read “ Little Women .” But Elena and Lila don’t merely read the book together. They recite it, they memorize it. They fantasize about emulating Jo March, who escaped poverty by writing. They wreck it with their love: “We read it for months, so many times that the book became tattered and sweat-stained, it lost its spine, came unthreaded, sections fell apart.”

This sequence is a delight in the TV adaptation, too, which is currently airing on HBO. On a bench in their grungy, violent Naples neighborhood, Elena and Lila lounge, bodies entwined, wearing shabby dresses, reading in unison, in Italian. (The show has English subtitles.) Excitedly, Lila recites a passage in which Jo herself reads out loud, from her first published short story, to her sisters, without telling them who wrote it. At the passage’s climax, when Jo reveals herself as the author, the two girls read Jo’s words together, their faces shining, as Lila pounds her chest: “ Vostra sorella!  ” (“Your sister!”) It’s a thrilling moment, which threw me back to the wild vulnerability of childhood reading. The scene is dramatic, or maybe just specific and sensual, in a way that the version on the page can’t be, and really doesn’t try to be. There’s no dialogue in the book, no chest-pounding, no description of the girls’ clothes, and no quotes from “Little Women.” Ferrante’s book confides more than it describes—that’s both its technique and its insinuating power.

A few years ago, every discussion of television seemed to be framed as “Is TV the New Novel?” It was a rivalry poisonous to both parties, not unlike the one between Lila and Elena, the top girls in their class. Not that I don’t get it: in the past two decades, technological advances have altered television in a way similar to how the modern novel—which began as an episodic, serialized, disposable medium, derided for its addictive qualities—emerged as a respected artistic phenomenon. With whole seasons released at once, a television series is now a text to be analyzed. There’s a TV-writing class at the University of Iowa. The anxiety is palpable, on both sides. What kind of art do intelligent people talk about? What do they binge on, late at night? Which art form is capable of the most originality, the greater depth, the wider influence—and which one makes you rich? (Would Jo be a showrunner?) It’s enough to make you crave a broader conversation, with respect for the strengths of each art, an interplay that’s more than a simple hierarchy.

The fact is, as beautiful as the scene in the show is, it never captures (and, notably, doesn’t try to capture) the eerie meta quality of the source, its self-conscious textuality—Ferrante’s fluid, ticklish bookishness , that sense of a voice in our ear. In the book, we are aware at all times that we are reading a novel written by Elena—and we also know that, outside this frame, we are reading a book by the pseudonymous Elena Ferrante, an author who, like Jo, conceals her identity. That wobbly frame of authorship, and the nagging anxiety about who gets to tell the story, is what drives Ferrante’s four-volume series, known as the Neapolitan novels (“My Brilliant Friend” is the first), about two working-class girls, one of whom turns the other into a book. It’s no wonder that a cult following has emerged in the U.S., driven by bookish, Jo-ish, Elena-like, author-worshipping women, giving the books a reputation that has sometimes reduced them to a universalizing primer on female friendship. This mood has been intensified by Ferrante’s own Banksy-level mystique.

In the book “My Brilliant Friend,” Elena, the teacher’s pet, sees the exceptional Lila as not merely her competition but also her role model, her mirror, and, eventually, her subject. From Elena’s perspective, her own “goodness,” the passive-aggressive repression of the grade grind, comes alive only when it is placed next to Lila’s fiery, feral, at times malevolent creative genius. In adolescence, the two part ways: Elena stays in school, Lila drops out. “My Brilliant Friend” is a story about many things—left-wing politics, male violence, fancy shoes, the warping force of patriarchy on female creativity—but it’s centrally about class-jumping, through education, the kind that makes one aware of the origins of social class, including the ways it’s embedded in art.

I watched the show before reading the book. That seemed like the best way for a television critic to approach a television production, anyway—to take the work at face value. Seen this way, the show was uncomplicatedly enjoyable. Gorgeously lit, dreamily paced, “My Brilliant Friend” is directed by Saverio Costanzo, who collaborated, via e-mail, with Ferrante. (She had selected him for the task.) It captures, with a certain gloom and grit, the claustrophobia of Ferrante’s postwar Naples, but it also has the polish of certain well-funded historical portraits of poverty, an unfortunate but perhaps unavoidable side effect of cinematic beauty. The music is too much, manipulative and poncey. But, over all, the show is immersive and astonishingly well cast, fuelled by the joy of gazing into the eyes of the actors who play Elena and Lila—Elisa Del Genio and Ludovica Nasti, as children, and Margherita Mazzucco and Gaia Girace, as teen-agers—inexperienced performers whose spontaneity feels liberating. These pleasures (beautiful people, sunlight, historical voyeurism) might sound superficial, but they are pleasures anyway.

After I read the book, it was clear how closely the adaptation follows its track. The most exciting sequences—the fairy-tale-like trading of the girls’ dolls; a long, near-hallucinogenic walk out of town; the bullying boys who woo the teen-age Lila—are dramatized without being aggressively transformed. Some critics have called the show dutiful, with the implication that it is not especially interesting as art. And maybe that’s fair. Costanzo doesn’t blow the story open or reshape it. He also doesn’t find a visual rhetoric that’s analogous to Elena’s nose-tugging narrative, with its air of nerdish obsession and banked fury—as opposed to, for example, the way that “ The Wolf of Wall Street ” felt distorted to reflect its narrator’s mania, or Jennifer Fox’s “ The Tale ,” another story in which a woman examines her painful childhood, made theatrical the clash of past and present.

Instead, the show takes an old-fashioned approach, by sublimating itself to its literary source, like a caring translator who will illuminate but won’t impose. And putting events on film does bring out fresh angles. Among other things, the violence feels different. In the book, Elena describes, with dark wit, a child’s-eye awareness of impending death everywhere: “Being hit with a stone could do it, and throwing stones was the norm.” Men beat their families, by default. (If they don’t beat their kids, their wives nag them to do so.) Thuggish businessmen pummel their competitors. Lila gets thrown out a window, breaking her arm, for wanting to attend middle school. On film, these scenes feel scarier. This is not just because it’s harder to see bodies get hurt than to read about it; it’s also that, rather than just seeing torsos kicked, we linger on the faces of bystanders, who are often children looking on in genuine terror. The book is a meditation on the intellectual outcomes of childhood trauma, an unfolding map of minds changing; the show, so focussed on the body, feels as if it were happening now.

Because the story feels less abstract, it also feels in conversation with certain other television dramas about brilliant girls from smothering villages, set in communities where male violence is no more notable than bad weather. These include “ Top of the Lake ,” by Jane Campion, which was set in an isolated New Zealand town; “ Sharp Objects ,” set in a Missouri town full of batshit Southern belles; and the excellent “ Happy Valley ,” set in the depressed Yorkshire countryside. In each of these stories, smart women suffer a sort of cultural amnesia about the ugly past—about sexual violence, especially—in order to keep the world stable. “My Brilliant Friend” is often at its best when it invokes this same crisis of knowledge, of growing up where everyone knows your business and no one can admit the truth. It’s about the escape hatch that clever girls squeeze through, simply by refusing to forget. ♦

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By Katy Waldman

By James Wood

By Jia Tolentino

Lila Book Review: Author Marilynne Robinson

• Published March 23, 2015

“Doll.” Doll had spied the dying child in a decrepit shack beneath a table and heard her chilling cough that presaged death. Doll runs into the night with the baby to try and save her life with no real hope of Lila’s survival, but survive she does. Because Doll’s scarred face is so memorable, she and Lila keep to back roads. They soon join a group of itinerants lead by a man who has strength and cunning. He can secure the group work in fields or factories. Enough work to keep Doll and Lila alive, and that is Doll’s number one goal. Mother and daughter stay to themselves and love one another desperately. Their isolation is to ward off unwelcome questions. It is a lesson in survival that Lila learns well.

Soon Doll realizes how bright her daughter is, and she decides to take a terrible risk. She stops moving around and accepts a job as a domestic in a household in a town so that Lila can attend school. Doll desperately wants for Lila to know how to read and to be competent with “figures.” That is addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Doll succeeds in her goal, but within 9 months, someone recognizes her. She and Lila have to pull up stakes and change locations in the middle of the night. Lila begins to better understand what her mother has taken on in order to protect her.

Lila begins to notice how much time Doll spends sharpening a knife that she carries. Lila wonders for whom and what Doll is preparing with her daily devotional at the whet stone. Eventually, the girl learns that her family has been in pursuit since she was kidnapped. Not because they want her back especially, but because their honor was besmirched when Lila was taken. Doll, at last, must face one of Lila’s kinfolks, but he loses to her fast hands and sharp knife. Even though Doll prevails, she has to go to jail. Lila, as a very young woman, has to figure out how to survive on her own. She does.

She ends up in a house of prostitution in St. Louis where one of the other women becomes pregnant. Lila begins dreaming of running away with that woman’s child just as Doll had run away with her. That plan does not work out for her. She eventually takes to the road again and finds herself in Gilead , Iowa in the Congregationalist Church of the Reverend John Ames. He is a man in his 60’s who has led a very lonely life since the death of his wife and daughter decades before.

Lila has ducked in to escape a terrible thunderstorm during Sunday services. She is struck by the beauty and peace of the church’s music and candles. She and the Reverend lock eyes, and they both feel something, but Lila, being the feral creature that she is, does not give the encounter much thought. However, Reverend Ames gives it a lot of thought and feeling.

They meet and talk and friendship and then love quickly ensues. A brief courtship follows. Lila feels out of her element, but she is, in fact, the one who suggested marriage. The minister would never have had the nerve to have come up with the idea as he was far too bashful. They do marry and have a child. Lila worries about her place in the community, but she tries to fit in.

“ Lila “ is an extraordinary novel about a courageous woman, wife and mother who could survive under any circumstances likely to come her way. Her husband understands the hard times that she has had to withstand and admires her for her mettle. Not only that, he loves her intellect, and her huge heart. A more unlikely couple you may never meet in all of fiction, nor one that will fascinate you more.

Happy reading as you discover another writer well worth your time and energy.

Dianne H. Patterson

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Lila (Oprah's Book Club): A Novel Hardcover – October 7, 2014

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The New York Times Bestseller Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award National Book Award Finalist 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.

• Book 3 of 4 Gilead
• Print length 272 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date October 7, 2014
• Dimensions 5.75 x 1 x 8.5 inches
• ISBN-10 0374187614
• ISBN-13 978-0374187613
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

“Writing in lovely, angular prose that has the high loneliness of an old bluegrass tune, Ms. Robinson has created a balladlike story . . . The novel is powerful and deeply affecting . . . Ms. Robinson renders [Lila's] tale with the stark poetry of Edward Hopper or Andrew Wyeth.” ―Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times “ 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 “My message is simple. Even if you haven't found the two previous books to your taste, give Lila a try . . . what we get . . . is the highest fictional magic: a character who seems so real, it's hard to remember that she exists only in the page of this book.” ―John Wilson, Chicago Tribune “ Lila , Marilynne Robinson's remarkable new novel, stands alone as a book to read and even read again. It's both a multilayered love story and a perceptive look at how early deprivation causes lasting damage . . . Robinson is a novelist of the first order.” ―Ellen Heltzel, The Seattle Times “ Grade: A Emotionally and intellectually challenging, it's an exploration of faith in God, love, and whatever else it takes to survive.” ― Entertainment Weekly “Gorgeous writing, an absolutely beautiful book . . . This should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Robinson, a novelist who can make the most quotidian moments epic because of her ability to peel back the surfaces of ordinary lives . . . [a] profound and deeply rendered novel.” ―David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times “Marilynne Robinson is one of the great religious novelists, not only of our age, but any age . . . Not even gorgeous is a strong enough word for what grandeur charges the pages of Lila .” ―Casey Cep, New Republic “Written in beautiful, precise language, [ Lila ] glows like a banked fire that provides steady illumination. Lila should prompt first-time Robinson readers to track down her other works.” ―Martha Woodall, Philadelphia Inquirer “Set aside the idea that Housekeeping , Marilynne Robinson's groundbreaking 1980 debut novel, should be on anyone's short list for the Great American Novel . . . It's just as well to open Lila with no preconceptions and just star reading. The pages in this volume are dense, but once you release yourself to Robinson's rhythms, the rewards are profound and layered, and what was intimidating becomes magnetic.” ― The Denver Post “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 “Marilynne Robinson tracks the movements of grace as if it were a wild animal, appearing for fleeting intervals and then disappearing past the range of vision, emerging again where we least expect to find it. Her novels are interested in what makes grace necessary at all--shame and its afterlife, loss and its residue, the limits and betrayals of intimacy. In Lila , her brilliant and deeply affecting new novel, even her description of sunlight in a St. Louis bordello holds a kind of heartbreak.” ―Leslie Jamison, The Atlantic “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 “In her new novel, Lila , Marilynne Robinson has written a deeply romantic love story embodied in the language and ideas of Calvinist doctrine. She really is not like any other writer. She really isn't . . . Robinson has created a small, rich and fearless body of work in which religion exists unashamedly, as does doubt, unashamedly.” ―Cathleen Schine, The New York Review of Books “Robinson's genius is for making indistinguishable the highest ends of faith and fiction . . . The beauty of Robinson's prose suggests an author continually threading with spun platinum the world's finest needle.” ―Michelle Orange, Bookforum “The protagonist of the stunning Lila is as lost a character as can be found in literature . . . Don't hesitate to read Lila . . . It's a novel that stands on its own and is surely one of the best of the year.” ―Holly Silva, St Louis Post-Dispatch “Existence and 'all the great storms that rise in it' are at the heart of Marilynne Robinson's glorious new novel, Lila . . . Lila is -- at once -- powerful, profound, and positively radiant in its depiction of its namesake, a child reared by drifters who finds a kindred soul in 'a big, silvery old man,' the Rev. John Ames . . . Life, death, joy, fear, doubt, love, violence, kindness -- all of this, and more, dwells in Lila , a book, I will venture, already for the ages, its protagonist engraved upon our souls.” ―Karen Brady, The Buffalo News “ Lila is a dark, powerful, uplifting, unforgettable novel. And Robinson's Gilead trilogy -- Gilead , Home , and Lila -- is a great achievement in American fiction.” ―Bryan Wooley, Dallas Morning News “ Starred Review This third of three novels set in the fictional plains town of Gilead, Iowa, is a masterpiece of prose in the service of the moral seriousness that distinguishes Robinson's work . . . Lila is a superb creation. Largely uneducated, almost feral, Lila has a thirst for stability and knowledge.” ― Publishers Weekly “ *Starred Review* Robinson has created a tour de force, an unforgettably dynamic odyssey, a passionate and learned moral and spiritual inquiry, a paean to the earth, and a witty and transcendent love story--all within a refulgent and resounding novel so beautifully precise and cadenced it wholly tranfixes and transforms us.” ―Donna Seaman, Booklist “ *Starred Review* This is a lovely and touching story that grapples with the universal question of how God can allow his children to suffer. Recommended for fans of Robinson as well as those who enjoyed Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge , another exploration of pain and loneliness set against the backdrop of a small town.” ―Evelyn Beck, Library 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

About the Author

Excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., farrar, straus and giroux.

The child was just there on the stoop in the dark, hugging herself against the cold, all cried out and nearly sleeping. She couldn’t holler anymore and they didn’t hear her anyway, or they might and that would make things worse. Somebody had shouted, Shut that thing up or I’ll do it! and then a woman grabbed her out from under the table by her arm and pushed her out onto the stoop and shut the door and the cats went under the house. They wouldn’t let her near them anymore because she picked them up by their tails sometimes. Her arms were all over scratches, and the scratches stung. She had crawled under the house to find the cats, but even when she did catch one in her hands it struggled harder the harder she held on to it and it bit her, so she let it go. Why you keep pounding at the screen door? Nobody gonna want you around if you act like that. And then the door closed again, and after a while night came. The people inside fought themselves quiet, and it was night for a long time. She was afraid to be under the house, and afraid to be up on the stoop, but if she stayed by the door it might open. There was a moon staring straight at her, and there were sounds in the woods, but she was nearly sleeping when Doll came up the path and found her there like that, miserable as could be, and took her up in her arms and wrapped her into her shawl, and said, “Well, we got no place to go. Where we gonna go?”

If there was anyone in the world the child hated worst, it was Doll. She’d go scrubbing at her face with a wet rag, or she’d be after her hair with a busted comb, trying to get the snarls out. Doll slept at the house most nights, and maybe she paid for it by sweeping up a little. She was the only one who did any sweeping, and she’d be cussing while she did it, Don’t do one damn bit of good, and someone would say, Then leave it be, dammit. There’d be people sleeping right on the floor, in some old mess of quilts and gunnysacks. You wouldn’t know from one day to the next.

When the child stayed under the table they would forget her most of the time. The table was shoved into a corner and they wouldn’t go to the trouble of reaching under to pull her out of there if she kept quiet enough. When Doll came in at night she would kneel down and spread that shawl over her, but then she left again so early in the morning that the child would feel the shawl slip off and she’d feel colder for the lost warmth of it, and stir, and cuss a little. But there would be hardtack, an apple, something, and a cup of water left there for her when she woke up. Once, there was a kind of toy. It was just a horse chestnut with a bit of cloth over it, tied with a string, and two knots at the sides and two at the bottom, like hands and feet. The child whispered to it and slept with it under her shirt.

Lila would never tell anyone about that time. She knew it would sound very sad, and it wasn’t, really. Doll had taken her up in her arms and wrapped her shawl around her. “You just hush now,” she said. “Don’t go waking folks up.” She settled the child on her hip and carried her into the dark house, stepping as carefully and quietly as she could, and found the bundle she kept in her corner, and then they went out into the chilly dark again, down the steps. The house was rank with sleep and the night was windy, full of tree sounds. The moon was gone and there was rain, so fine then it was only a tingle on the skin. The child was four or five, long-legged, and Doll couldn’t keep her covered up, but she chafed at her calves with her big, rough hand and brushed the damp from her cheek and her hair. She whispered, “Don’t know what I think I’m doing. Never figured on it. Well, maybe I did. I don’t know. I guess I probly did. This sure ain’t the night for it.” She hitched up her apron to cover the child’s legs and carried her out past the clearing. The door might have opened, and a woman might have called after them, Where you going with that child? and then, after a minute, closed the door again, as if she had done all decency required. “Well,” Doll whispered, “we’ll just have to see.”

The road wasn’t really much more than a path, but Doll had walked it so often in the dark that she stepped over the roots and around the potholes and never paused or stumbled. She could walk quickly when there was no light at all. And she was strong enough that even an awkward burden like a leggy child could rest in her arms almost asleep. Lila knew it couldn’t have been the way she remembered it, as if she were carried along in the wind, and there were arms around her to let her know she was safe, and there was a whisper at her ear to let her know that she shouldn’t be lonely. The whisper said, “I got to find a place to put you down. I got to find a dry place.” And then they sat on the ground, on pine needles, Doll with her back against a tree and the child curled into her lap, against her breast, hearing the beat of her heart, feeling it. Rain fell heavily. Big drops spattered them sometimes. Doll said, “I should have knowed it was coming on rain. And now you got the fever.” But the child just lay against her, hoping to stay where she was, hoping the rain wouldn’t end. Doll may have been the loneliest woman in the world, and she was the loneliest child, and there they were, the two of them together, keeping each other warm in the rain.

When the rain ended, Doll got to her feet, awkwardly with the child in her arms, and tucked the shawl around her as well as she could. She said, “I know a place.” The child’s head would drop back, and Doll would heft her up again, trying to keep her covered. “We’re almost there.”

It was another cabin with a stoop, and a dooryard beaten bare. An old black dog got up on his forelegs, then his hind legs, and barked, and an old woman opened the door. She said, “No work for you here, Doll. Nothing to spare.”

Doll sat down on the stoop. “Just thought I’d rest a little.”

“What you got there? Where’d you get that child?”

“Never mind.”

“Well, you better put her back.”

“Maybe. Don’t think I will, though.”

“Better feed her something, at least.”

Doll said nothing.

The old woman went into the house and brought out a scrap of corn bread. She said, “I was about to do the milking. You might as well go inside, get her in out of the cold.”

Doll stood with her by the stove, where there was just the little warmth of the banked embers. She whispered, “You hush. I got something for you here. You got to eat it.” But the child couldn’t rouse herself, couldn’t keep her head from lolling back. So Doll knelt with her on the floor to free her hands, and pinched off little pills of corn bread and put them in the child’s mouth, one after another. “You got to swallow.”

The old woman came back with a pail of milk. “Warm from the cow,” she said. “Best thing for a child.” That strong, grassy smell, raw milk in a tin cup. Doll gave it to her in sips, holding her head in the crook of her arm.

“Well, she got something in her, if she keeps it down. Now I’ll put some wood on the fire and we can clean her up some.”

When the room was warmer and the water in the kettle was warm, the old woman held her standing in a white basin on the floor by the stove and Doll washed her down with a rag and a bit of soap, scrubbing a little where the cats had scratched her, and on the chigger bites and mosquito bites where she had scratched herself, and where there were slivers in her knees, and where she had a habit of biting her hand. The water in the basin got so dirty they threw it out the door and started over. Her whole body shivered with the cold and the sting. “Nits,” the old woman said. “We got to cut her hair.” She fetched a razor and began shearing off the tangles as close to the child’s scalp as she dared—“I got a blade here. She better hold still.” Then they soaped and scrubbed her head, and water and suds ran into her eyes, and she struggled and yelled with all the strength she had and told them both they could rot in hell. The old woman said, “You’ll want to talk to her about that.”

Doll touched the soap and tears off the child’s face with the hem of her apron. “Never had the heart to scold her. Them’s about the only words I ever heard her say.” They made her a couple of dresses out of flour sacks with holes cut in them for her head and arms. They were stiff at first and smelled of being saved in a chest or a cupboard, and they had little flowers all over them, like Doll’s apron.

It seemed like one long night, but it must have been a week, two weeks, rocking on Doll’s lap while the old woman fussed around them.

“You don’t have enough trouble, I guess. Carrying off a child that’s just going to die on you anyway.”

“Ain’t going to let her die.”

“Oh? When’s the last time you got to decide about something?”

“If I left her be where she was, she’da died for sure.”

“Well, maybe her folks won’t see it that way. They know you took her? What you going to say when they come looking for her? She’s buried in the woods somewhere? Out by the potato patch? I don’t have troubles enough of my own?”

Doll said, “Nobody going to come looking.”

“You probly right about that. That’s the spindliest damn child I ever saw.”

But the whole time she talked she’d be stirring a pot of grits and blackstrap molasses. Doll would give the child a spoonful or two, then rock her a little while, then give her another spoonful. She rocked her and fed her all night long, and dozed off with her cheek against the child’s hot forehead.

The old woman got up now and then to put more wood in the stove. “She keeping it down?”

“She taking any water?”

When the old woman went away again Doll would whisper to her, “Now, don’t you go dying on me. Put me to all this bother for nothing. Don’t you go dying.” And then, so the child could barely hear, “You going to die if you have to. I know. But I got you out of the rain, didn’t I? We’re warm here, ain’t we?”

After a while the old woman again. “Put her in my bed if you want. I guess I won’t be sleeping tonight, either.”

“I got to make sure she can breathe all right.”

“Let me set with her then.”

“She’s clinging on to me.”

“Well.” The old woman brought the quilt from her bed and spread it over them.

The child could hear Doll’s heart beating and she could feel the rise and fall of her breath. It was too warm and she felt herself struggling against the quilt and against Doll’s arms and clinging to her at the same time with her arms around her neck.

Copyright © 2014 by Marilynne Robinson

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st Edition (October 7, 2014)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0374187614
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0374187613
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.1 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.75 x 1 x 8.5 inches
• #31,211 in Literary Fiction (Books)
• #35,456 in American Literature (Books)
• #46,284 in Historical Fiction (Books)

About the author

Marilynne robinson.

Marilynne Robinson is the author of the bestselling novels "Lila," "Home" (winner of the Orange Prize), "Gilead" (winner of the Pulitzer Prize), and "Housekeeping" (winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award).

She has also written four books of nonfiction, "When I Was a Child I Read Books," "Absence of Mind," "Mother Country" and "The Death of Adam." She teaches at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

She has been given honorary degrees from Brown University, the University of the South, Holy Cross, Notre Dame, Amherst, Skidmore, and Oxford University. She was also elected a fellow of Mansfield College, Oxford University.

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New Cold Wars review: China, Russia and Biden’s daunting task

David Sanger of the New York Times delivers a must-read on the foreign policy challenges now facing US leaders

R ussia bombards Ukraine. Israel and Hamas are locked in a danse macabre. The threat of outright war between Jerusalem and Tehran grows daily. Beijing and Washington snarl. In a moment like this, David Sanger’s latest book, subtitled China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West , is a must-read. Painstakingly researched, New Cold Wars brims with on-record interviews and observations by thinly veiled sources.

Officials closest to the president talk with an eye on posterity. The words of the CIA director, Bill Burns, repeatedly appear on the page. Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, and Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, surface throughout the book. Sanger, White House and national security correspondent for the New York Times, fuses access, authority and curiosity to deliver an alarming message: US dominance is no longer axiomatic.

In the third decade of the 21st century, China and Russia defy Washington, endeavoring to shatter the status quo while reaching for past glories. Vladimir Putin sees himself as the second coming of Peter the Great, “a dictator … consumed by restoring the old Russian empire and addressing old grievances”, in Sanger’s words.

The possibility of nuclear war is no longer purely theoretical. “In 2021 Biden, [Gen Mark] Milley, and the new White House national security team discovered that America’s nuclear holiday was over,” Sanger writes. “They were plunging into a new era that was far more complicated than the cold war had ever been.”

As Russia’s war on Ukraine faltered, Putin and the Kremlin raised the specter of nuclear deployment against Kyiv.

“The threat that Russia might use a nuclear weapon against its non-nuclear-armed foe surfaced and resurfaced every few months,” Sanger recalls.

The world was no longer “flat”. Rather, “the other side began to look more like a security threat and less like a lucrative market”. Unfettered free trade and interdependence had yielded prosperity and growth for some but birthed anger and displacement among many. Nafta – the North American Free Trade Agreement – became a figurative four-letter word. In the US, counties that lost jobs to China and Mexico went for Trump in 2016 .

Biden and the Democrats realized China never was and never would be America’s friend. “‘I think it’s fair to say that just about every assumption across different administrations was wrong,” one of Biden’s “closest advisers” tells Sanger.

“‘The internet would bring political liberty. Trade would liberalize the regime’ while creating high-skill jobs for Americans. The list went on. A lot of it was just wishful thinking.”

Sanger also captures the despondency that surrounded the botched US withdrawal from Afghanistan. A suicide bombing at the Kabul airport left 13 US soldiers and 170 civilians dead. The event still haunts.

“The president came into the room shortly thereafter, and at that point Gen [Kenneth] McKenzie informed him of the attack and also the fact that there had been at least several American military casualties, fatalities in the attack,” Burns recalls. “I remember the president just paused for at least 30 seconds or so and put his head down because he was absorbing the sadness of the moment and the sense of loss as well.”

Almost three years later, Biden’s political standing has not recovered. “The bitter American experience in Afghanistan and Iraq seemed to underscore the dangers of imperial overreach,” Sanger writes. With Iran on the front burner and the Middle East mired in turmoil, what comes next is unclear.

A coda: a recent supplemental review conducted by the Pentagon determined that a sole Isis member carried out the Kabul bombing. The review also found that the attack was tactically unpreventable.

Sanger also summarizes a tense exchange between Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel , over the Gaza war.

“Hadn’t the US firebombed Tokyo during world war two? Netanyahu demanded. “Hadn’t it unleashed two atom bombs? What about the thousands who died in Mosul, as the US sought to wipe out Isis?”

On Thursday, the US vetoed a resolution to confer full UN membership on the “State of Palestine”. Hours later, Standard & Poor’s downgraded Israel’s credit rating and Israel retaliated against Iran.

N ew Cold Wars does contain lighter notes. For example, Sanger catches Donald Trump whining to Randall Stephenson, then CEO of AT&T , about his (self-inflicted) problems with women. The 45th president invited Stephenson to the Oval Office, to discuss China and telecommunications. Things did not quite work out that way.

“Trump burned up the first 45 minutes of the meeting by riffing on how men got into trouble,” Sanger writes. “It was all about women. Then he went into a long diatribe about Stormy Daniels.”

Stephenson later recalled: “It was ‘all part of the same stand-up comedy act’ … and ‘we were left with 15 minutes to talk about Chinese infrastructure’.”

Trump wasn’t interested. Stephenson “could see that the president’s mind was elsewhere. ‘This is really boring,’ Trump finally said.”

On Thursday, in Trump’s hush-money case in New York, the parties picked a jury. Daniels is slated to be a prosecution witness.

Sanger ends his book on a note of nostalgia – and trepidation.

“For all the present risks, it is worth remembering that one of the most remarkable and little-discussed accomplishments of the old cold war was that the great powers never escalated their differences into a direct conflict. That is an eight-decade-long streak we cannot afford to break.”

New Cold Wars is published in the US by Penguin Random House

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Column: Trump’s antics didn’t stop his New York hush money trial. Here’s why he’ll keep them up

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After a pretrial period replete with juvenile tantrums, nonstarter attempts to delay the proceedings, and savage attacks on prosecutors, the presiding judge and New Yorkers in general, Donald Trump is about to face the men and women who will decide whether he is guilty of 34 felony charges.

With the start of his historic hush money trial in Manhattan on Monday , the former president might be expected to abandon these so far unsuccessful tactics. But don’t bet on it.

The trial’s opening act will likely feature much the same brand of petulance and vituperation from the defendant, now redirected to the jury selection process.

Litman: Trump is finally facing a criminal trial — and a judge determined to keep it on track

Even as the ex-president got a bond reduced in New York, Judge Juan M. Merchan set a trial date in the hush money case, upbraided the defense and imposed a gag order.

March 26, 2024

Expect Trump to beat the same drum he has for several months, savaging anyone within legal reach — that is, not expressly off limits under the gag orders Justice Juan M. Merchan has imposed — and playing the martyr suffering for his followers at the hands of the anti-MAGA elite.

Even as he faces the tangible prospect of a conviction and prison sentence — though appeals could take several years — his strategy will continue to be more political than legal. He’s hoping to win the presidency and then figure out how to clean up the various train wrecks left in his path.

To begin with, that means Trump and his legal team can be expected to rail at Merchan’s decisions about whom to seat on the jury.

Litman: Jack Smith’s latest push to get Donald Trump’s Jan. 6 trial moving before the election

The special counsel urged the Supreme Court to let the case proceed as soon as possible rather than delaying it for theoretical questions about presidential immunity.

April 10, 2024

Like most jurisdictions, Manhattan follows a set of rules that impose a rigorous strategy on the litigants. Each side has 10 golden tickets known as peremptory challenges, which can be used to exclude a prospective juror for any or no reason (so long as it is not unconstitutionally based on race). In addition, each side can argue for an unlimited number of challenges “for cause.”

The latter are for jurors the litigants argue are unfit to serve for any number of reasons. They could have a close relationship with a party or lawyer in the case, personal experience with the type of crime alleged or some other conflict or bias. In general, the court must agree that they are incapable of carrying out the juror’s core responsibility of applying the law fairly to the evidence.

The prosecution and defense will have disparate strategies. The prosecution will want reasonable and persuadable people who are able to collaborate collegially and come to a consensus. Their ideal candidate may be along the lines of a well-educated professional.

Trump, meanwhile, has little prospect of acquittal, so his team will search for a juror willing to buck the other 11 no matter how strong their consensus. That means a maverick whose life choices reflect indifference or even antipathy toward the crowd.

Given a defendant of Trump’s notoriety, the jury will inevitably include people with strong views about him. The quest of the jury selection process is not for people who have no views about the former president but rather those who can set aside whatever personal views they have and render a judgment based on the evidence and the law.

That means potential jurors may present themselves and express views — including negative views about Trump — but, on questioning from the judge and prosecutor, aver that they can apply the law and reach a verdict fairly.

Even if Trump’s side argues that a juror is inclined to convict, the judge may side with prosecutors and conclude that they can be trusted to do their duty. And then Trump’s counsel will have to decide whether to use one of their precious peremptory challenges. Eventually, they will be forced to accept jurors they don’t like.

Such losing arguments will be more fuel for Trump’s eternal fire of victimhood and grievance, and we can expect him to leverage them as supposed proof of the deep state conspiracy to take him down. And if his complaints cross the lines drawn by Merchan’s gag orders, they could set up an ancillary set of bitter legal battles. Prosecutors have already moved to have Trump held in contempt for incendiary social media messages on the eve and at the start of the trial.

Trump’s political strategy has always been in tension with his legal vulnerability, leading him to vilify the judges presiding over his cases and essentially dare them to hold him in contempt. Now that a jury is sitting in judgment of his conduct, that strategy will go from dubious to asinine. Still, he hasn’t given us any reason to expect him to abandon it.

Look for the jury selection process and the trial to feature more of Trump’s tantrums in court and tirades on the courthouse steps, sorely trying the patience of all involved, not least the judge.

Harry Litman is the host of the “Talking Feds” podcast and the Talking San Diego speaker series. @harrylitman

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Harry Litman, the senior legal affairs columnist for the Opinion page, is a former U.S. attorney and deputy assistant attorney general. He is the creator and host of the “Talking Feds” podcast ( @talkingfedspod ). Litman teaches constitutional and national security law at UCLA and UC San Diego and is a regular commentator on MSNBC, CNN and CBS News.

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Donald Trump and Megan Mullally performing the Green Acres theme song at the Emmy Awards, Los Angeles, September 2005

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In the Warsaw Ghetto in October 1941 Mary Berg, then a teenager, wrote in her diary about the improbable persistence of laughter in that hellish place:

Every day at the Art Café on Leszno Street one can hear songs and satires on the police, the ambulance service, the rickshaws, and even the Gestapo, in a veiled fashion. The typhus epidemic itself is the subject of jokes. It is laughter through tears, but it is laughter. This is our only weapon in the ghetto—our people laugh at death and at the Nazi decrees. Humor is the only thing the Nazis cannot understand.

Berg here movingly expresses a common and comforting idea. Laughter is one of the few weapons that the weak have against the strong. Gallows humor is the one thing that cannot be taken away from those who are about to be hanged, the final death-defying assertion of human dignity and freedom. And the hangmen don’t get the jokes. Fascists don’t understand humor.

There is great consolation in these thoughts. Yet is it really true that fascists don’t get humor? Racist, misogynistic, antisemitic, xenophobic, antidisabled, and antiqueer jokes have always been used to dehumanize those who are being victimized. The ghetto humor that Berg recorded was a way of keeping self-pity at bay. But as Sigmund Freud pointed out, jokes can also be a way of shutting down pity itself by identifying those who are being laughed at as the ones not worthy of it: “A saving in pity is one of the most frequent sources of humorous pleasure.” Humor, as in Berg’s description, may be a way of telling us not to feel sorry for ourselves. But it is more often a way of telling us not to feel sorry for others. It creates an economy of compassion, limiting it to those who are laughing and excluding those who are being laughed at. It makes the polarization of humanity fun.

Around the time that Berg was writing her diary, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer were pointing to the relationship between Nazi rallies and this kind of comedy. The rally, they suggested, was an arena in which a release that was otherwise forbidden was officially permitted:

The anti-Semites gather to celebrate the moment when authority lifts the ban; that moment alone makes them a collective, constituting the community of kindred spirits. Their ranting is organized laughter. The more dreadful the accusations and threats, the greater the fury, the more withering is the scorn. Rage, mockery, and poisoned imitation are fundamentally the same thing.

Donald Trump is not a Nazi, and his followers are (mostly) not fascists. But it is not hard to see how this description resonates with his campaign appearances. Trump is America’s biggest comedian. His badinage is hardly Wildean, but his put-downs, honed to the sharpness of stilettos, are many people’s idea of fun. For them, he makes anger, fear, and resentment entertaining.

For anyone who questions how much talent and charisma this requires, there is a simple answer: Ron DeSantis. Why did DeSantis’s attempt to appeal to Republican voters as a straitlaced version of Trump fall so flat? Because Trumpism without the cruel laughter is nothing. It needs its creator’s fusion of rage, mockery, and poisoned imitation, whether of a reporter with a disability or (in a dumb show that Trump has been playing out in his speeches in recent months) of Joe Biden apparently unable to find his way off a stage. It demands the withering scorn for Sleepy Joe and Crooked Hillary, Crazy Liz and Ron DeSanctimonious, Cryin’ Chuck and Phoney Fani. It requires the lifting of taboos to create a community of kindred spirits. It depends on Trump’s ability to be pitiless in his ridicule of the targets of his contempt while allowing his audience to feel deeply sorry for itself. (If tragedy, as Aristotle claimed, involves terror and pity, Trump’s tragicomedy deals in terror and self-pity.)

Hard as it is to understand, especially for those of us who are too terrified to be amused, Trump’s ranting is organized laughter. To understand his continuing hold over his fans, we have to ask: Why is he funny?

This is not the 1930s or the 1940s, and we should not expect this toxic laughter to be organized quite as it was then. Trump functions in a culture supersaturated with knowingness and irony. In twentieth-century European fascism, the relationship between words and actions was clear: the end point of mockery was annihilation. Now, the joke is “only a joke.” Populist politics exploits the doubleness of comedy—the way that “only a joke” can so easily become “no joke”—to create a relationship of active connivance between the leader and his followers in which everything is permissible because nothing is serious.

This shift has happened in Europe, too. Think of Boris Johnson’s clown act, his deliberately ruffled hair, rumpled clothes, and ludicrous language. Or think of Giorgia Meloni, the first Italian prime minister from the far right since Benito Mussolini, posting on election day in September 2022 a TikTok video of herself holding two large melons ( meloni in Italian) in front of her breasts: fascism as adolescent snigger. It is impossible to think of previous far-right leaders engaging in such public self-mockery. Only in our time is it possible for a politician to create a sense of cultlike authority by using the collusiveness of comedy, the idea that the leader and his followers are united by being in on the joke.

Trump may be a narcissist, but he has a long history of this kind of self-caricature. When he did the Top Ten List on the David Letterman show in 2009, he seemed entirely comfortable delivering with a knowing smirk the top ten “financial tips” written for him, including “When nobody’s watching I go into a 7/11 and stick my head under a soda nozzle”; “Save money by styling your own hair” (pointing to his own improbable coiffure); “Sell North Dakota to the Chinese”; “If all else fails, steal someone’s identity”; and “The fastest way to get rich: marry and divorce me.” This performance, moreover, was the occasion for Trump’s entry into the world of social media. His first ever tweet was: “Be sure to tune in and watch Donald Trump on Late Night with David Letterman as he presents the Top Ten List tonight!”

At the 2005 Emmy Awards, Trump dressed in blue overalls and a straw hat and, brandishing a pitchfork, sang the theme song from the 1960s TV comedy Green Acres . Trump is a terrible singer and a worse actor, but he seemed completely unembarrassed on stage. He understood the joke: that Oliver, the fictional character he was impersonating, is a wealthy Manhattanite who moves to rustic Hooterville to run a farm, following his dream of the simple life—an alternative self that was amusing because it was, for Trump, unimaginable. But he may have sensed that there was also a deep cultural resonance. The Apprentice was “reality TV ,” a form in which the actual and the fictional are completely fused.

Green Acres , scenes from which played on a screen behind Trump as he was singing, pioneered this kind of metatelevision. Its debut episode set it up as a supposed documentary presented by a well-known former newscaster. Its characters regularly broke the fourth wall. When Oliver launched into rhapsodic speeches about American rural values, a fife rendition of “Yankee Doodle” would play on the soundtrack, and the other characters would move around in puzzlement trying to figure out where the musician was. Eva Gabor, playing Oliver’s pampered wife, admits on the show that her only real talent is doing impressions of Zsa Zsa Gabor, the actor’s more famous real-life sister.

The critic Armond White wrote in 1985 that “ Green Acres ’ surreal rationale is to capture the moment American gothic turns American comic.” Trump playing Oliver in 2005 may be the moment American comedy turned gothic again. Whoever had the idea of connecting Trump back to Green Acres clearly understood that “Donald Trump” had by then also become a metatelevision character, a real-life failed businessman who impersonated an ultrasuccessful mogul on The Apprentice . And Trump went along with the conceit because he instinctively understood that self-parody was not a threat to his image—it was his image. This connection to Green Acres was reestablished by Trump himself as president of the United States. In December 2018, as he was about to sign the Farm Bill into law, Trump tweeted, “Farm Bill signing in 15 minutes! #Emmys #TBT,” with a clip of himself in the Green Acres spoof. Hooterville and the White House were as one.

What is new in the development of antidemocratic politics is that Trump brings all this comic doubleness—the confusion of the real and the performative, of character and caricature—to bear on the authoritarian persona of the caudillo, the duce, the strongman savior. The prototype dictators of the far right may have looked absurd to their critics (“Hitler,” wrote Adorno and Horkheimer, “can gesticulate like a clown, Mussolini risk false notes like a provincial tenor”), but within the community of their followers and the shadow community of their intended victims, their histrionics had to be taken entirely seriously. Trump, on the other hand, retains all his self-aware absurdity even while creating a political persona of immense consequence.

This comic-authoritarian politics has some advantages over the older dictatorial style. It allows a threat to democracy to appear as at worst a tasteless prank: in the 2016 presidential campaign even liberal outlets like The New York Times took Hillary Clinton’s e-mails far more seriously than Trump’s open stirring of hatred against Mexicans and Muslims. Funny-autocratic functions better in a society like that of the US, where the boundaries of acceptable insult are still shifting and mainstream hate-mongering still has to be light on its feet. It allows racial insults and brazen lies to be issued, as it were, in inverted commas. If you don’t see those invisible quotation marks, you are not smart enough—or you are too deeply infected by the woke mind virus—to be in on the joke. You are not part of the laughing community. The importance of not being earnest is that it defines the boundaries of the tribe. The earnest are the enemy.

The extreme right in America was very quick to understand the potency of “only a joke” in the Internet age. In a 2001 study of three hate speech websites sympathetic to the Ku Klux Klan, Michael Billig noted that each of them described itself on its home page as a humorous exercise. The largest, called “N…..jokes KKK ” (the ellipsis is mine) carried the disclaimers: “You agree by entering this site, that this type of joke is legal where you live, and you agree that you recognize this site is meant as a joke not to be taken seriously”; “And you agree that this site is a comedy site, not a real racist site”; “We ARE NOT real life racists.”

What does “real life” even mean when Klansmen are not really racist? The power of this “humorous” mode of discourse lies at least partly in the way it blurs the distinctions between the real and the symbolic, and between words and actions. Consider the example of some of the men tried for their alleged parts in a 2020 plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan. One of them, Barry Croft, insisted at his trial in 2022 that he was joking most of the time when he posted on Facebook questions like “Which governor is going to end up being dragged off and hung for treason first?” Another, Brandon Caserta, was acquitted in 2022 in part because he successfully pleaded that violent statements he made on Facebook and in secretly recorded meetings of the group were not serious. These included claims that the Second Amendment sanctions the killing of “agents of the government when they become tyrannical.” “I may kill dozens of agents but eventually die in the process,” Caserta wrote on Facebook in May 2020. He later posted that he would beat government agents so hard they would “beg til they couldn’t beg any more because their mouth is so full of blood.”

At Croft’s trial, his defense attorney put it to an FBI witness that a meme Croft posted showing thirty bullets as “30 votes that count” was “A little tongue-in-cheek? A little bit funny?” On the second season of Jon Ronson’s superb podcast series for the BBC , Things Fell Apart , Caserta acknowledges that, on the secret recordings, he is heard to urge his fellow militia members that any lawyers advocating for the Covid vaccine be decapitated in their own homes, speaks of “wanting Zionist banker blood,” and advocates blowing up buildings where the vaccine is manufactured. He nonetheless insists to Ronson:

This isn’t something I’m dead serious about. This is nothing I ever planned. It’s funny, dude! It’s funny! It’s fun to blow stuff up. It’s fun to shoot guns. It’s fun to say ridiculous offensive shit. And if it offends you, so what? I don’t care about your feelings and how you feel about words. Sorry!

The twist of logic here is striking: Caserta equates blowing stuff up and shooting people with saying ridiculous offensive shit. Violent words and violent actions are all covered by the same disclaimer—one that Trump’s apologists use to blur the relationship between his words and his followers’ actions in the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. In the Trumpian twilight zone where democracy is dying but not yet dead, the connection between words (“fight like hell”) and deeds (the armed invasion of the Capitol) must be both strong and weak, sufficiently “no joke” to be understood by the faithful yet sufficiently “only a joke” to be deniable to the infidels. The comic mode is what creates the plausible deniability that in turn allows what used to be mainstream Republicans (and some Democrats) to remain in denial about what Trumpism really means.

For those who love Trump, there is something carnivalesque in all of this. In his discussion of “mediaeval laughter” in Rabelais and His World , Mikhail Bakhtin wrote that “one might say that it builds its own world versus the official world, its own church versus the official church, its own state versus the official state.” Bakhtin suggested that the

festive liberation of laughter…was a temporary suspension of the entire official system with all its prohibitions and hierarchic barriers. For a short time life came out of its usual, legalized and consecrated furrows and entered the sphere of utopian freedom.

Trump and many of his followers have made this quite literal. They create their own America, their own republic, their own notions of legality, their own church of the leader’s cult, their own state versus what they see as the official state. In this way, extreme polarization becomes a sphere of utopian freedom.

This is the capacious zone in which Trump’s comedy operates, an arena that admits everyone who gets the joke, from those who fantasize about killing tyrants, decapitating lawyers, and torturing government agents to those who just like to blow off steam by listening to their hero saying stuff that riles the woke enemy. It is crucial that in Trump’s delivery there is no shift from mockery to seriousness, no line between entertainment and violence. His singsong tone is generous and flexible, serving equally well for vaudeville and vituperation. In his streams of consciousness, they flow together as complementary currents.

In the recent speeches in which he has upped the ante on openly fascist rhetoric by characterizing his opponents as “vermin” and accusing immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country,” it is notable that his cadence is soft, almost lilting. There is no warning to his audience that these comments are of a different order. They are not even applause lines. By underplaying them, Trump leaves open the fundamental question: Is his mimicking of Hitler’s imagery just another impersonation, all of a piece with the way he does Biden and Haley in funny voices or even with the way he sings the theme song from Green Acres ?

Even when Trump actually goes the whole way and acknowledges that his rhetoric is indeed Hitlerian, as he did in a speech in Iowa after the alarmed reaction of liberals to his previous “poisoning the blood” speech, it is in a passage that jumbles together murderous intent, complaint about the media, and comic acting: “They are destroying the blood of our country. That’s what they’re doing…. They don’t like it when I said that. And I never read Mein Kampf .” But he makes the “Kampf” funny, puckering his lips and elongating the “pf” so it sounds like a rude noise. He continues: “They said ‘Oh, Hitler said that.’” Then he adds his defense: “in a much different way.” It is the stand-up comedian’s credo: it’s not the jokes, it’s the way you tell ’em. And this is, indeed, true—the difference is in the way he tells it, in a voice whose ambiguous pitch has been perfected over many years of performance.

The knowingness is all. In the speech in Conway, South Carolina, on February 10, in which he openly encouraged Russia to attack “delinquent” members of NATO , this startling statement, with potential world-historical consequences, was preceded by Trump’s metatheatrical riff on the idea of “fun.” What was fun, he told his followers, was the reaction he could provoke just by saying “Barack Hussein Obama”:

Every time I say it, anytime I want to have a little fun…even though the country is going to hell, we have to have a little bit of fun…. Remember Rush Limbaugh, he’d go “Barack Hooosaynn Obama”—I wonder what he was getting at.

He then segued into another commentary on his own well-honed send-up of Joe Biden: “I do the imitation where Biden can’t find his way off the stage…. So I do the imitation—is this fun?—I say this guy can’t put two sentences together…and then I go ‘Watch!’” (He said the word with a comic pout.) “I’ll imitate him. I go like this: ‘Haw!’” Trump hunches his shoulders and extends his arm, in a parody of Biden’s gestures. In this burlesque, Trump is not just mimicking his opponent; he is explicitly reenacting his own previous mocking impersonation, complete with commentary. He is simultaneously speaking, acting, and speaking about his acting.

It is within this “fun” frame that Trump proceeded to insinuate that there is something awry with Nikki Haley’s marriage: “Where’s her husband? Oh he’s away…. What happened to her husband? What happened to her husband! Where is he? He’s gone. He knew, he knew.” He and presumably many members of the audience were aware that Michael Haley is currently serving in Djibouti with the South Carolina National Guard. But as part of the show, with the funny voices and the exaggerated gestures, that lurid hint at some mysteriously unmentionable scandal (“He knew, he knew”) is somehow amusing. And then so is Trump’s story about telling an unnamed head of a “big” NATO country that the US would not defend it from invasion and—the punch line—that he would “encourage” Russia “to do whatever the hell they want.” Here Trump is acting in both senses, both ostentatiously performing and exerting a real influence on global politics—but which is which? How can we tell the dancer from the dance?

This shuffling in a typical Trump speech of different levels of seriousness—personal grudges beside grave geopolitics, savage venom mixed with knockabout farce, possible truths rubbing up against outrageous lies—creates a force field of incongruities. Between the looming solidity of Trump’s body and the airy, distracted quality of his words, in which weightless notions fly off before they are fully expressed, he seems at once immovable and in manic flux.

Incongruity has long been seen as one of the conditions of comedy. Francis Hutcheson in Reflections Upon Laughter (1725) noted that it is “this contrast or opposition of ideas of dignity and meanness which is the occasion of laughter.” The supposedly dignified idea of “greatness” is vital to Trump’s presence and rhetoric. But it is inextricably intertwined with the mean, the inconsequential, even the infantile. He is at one moment the grandiose man of destiny and the next a naughty child—an incongruity that can be contained only within an organized laughter in which the juxtaposition of incompatibilities is the essence of fun. This is why Trump’s lapses into pure gibberish—like telling a National Rifle Association gathering in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on February 9 that the Democrats are planning to “change the name of Pennsylvania” and that, in relation to the marble columns in the hall, it was “incredible how they could [have been built] years ago without the powerful tractors that you have today”—do not make his fans alarmed about his mental acuity. Cognitive dysfunction is not a worry with a man whose métier is cognitive dissonance.

Part of the dissonance is that Trump’s stand-up routine is completely dependent on the idea that he and his audience most despise: political correctness. Like much of the worst of contemporary comedy, Trump both amuses and thrills his audience by telling them that he is saying what he is not allowed to say. “Beautiful women,” he said at the rally in South Carolina after pointing to a group of female superfans in the audience. “You’re not allowed to say that anymore, but I’ll say it…. That usually is the end of a career, but I’ll say it.” There are so many layers to a moment like this: the idea that the woke mob is stopping manly men from complimenting attractive women, a sideways nod toward the “pussygate” tapes that should have ended Trump’s political career but didn’t, a dig at the Me Too movement, a reiteration of Trump’s right to categorize women as “my type” or “not my type,” the power of the leader to lift prohibitions—not just for himself but, in this carnivalesque arena of utopian freedom, for everyone in the audience.

Flirting with the unsayable has long been part of his shtick. If we go all the way back to May 1992 to watch Trump on Letterman’s show, there is a moment when Trump silently mouths the word “shit.” He does this in a way that must have been practiced rather than spontaneous—it takes some skill to form an unspoken word so clearly for a TV audience that everyone immediately understands it. Letterman plays his straight man: “You ain’t that rich, Don, you can’t come on here and say that.” But of course Trump did not “say” it. A sympathetic audience loves a moment like this because it is invited to do the transgressive part in its head. It gets the pleasure of filling in the blank.

Trump’s audiences, in other words, are not passive. This comedy is a joint enterprise of performer and listener. It gives those listeners the opportunity for consent and collusion. Consider a televised speech Trump gave at the Al Smith Dinner, hosted by the Catholic archbishop of New York, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, in October 2016, near the end of the presidential campaign. The dinner, held to raise money for Catholic charities, is traditionally the last occasion on which the two main presidential candidates share a stage—Hillary Clinton was also present. Trump deadpanned that he knew he would have a receptive audience because “so many of you in the archdiocese already have a place in your heart for a guy who started out as a carpenter working for his father. I was a carpenter working for my father. True.”

What is the joke here? That Trump is like Jesus Christ. Imagine if Clinton had attempted an equivalent gag. There would have been outrage and uproar: Clinton has insulted all Christians by making a blasphemous comparison between herself and the divine Savior. But the cameras cut to Dolan, a sycophantic supporter of Trump, and showed him laughing heartily. And if the cardinal found it funny, it was funny. It was thus an in-joke. If Clinton had made it, it would be the ultimate out-joke, proof of the Democrats’ contempt for people of faith.

But what is allowed as funny will sooner or later be proposed seriously. Many of those attending Trump rallies now wear T-shirts that proclaim “Jesus Is My Savior. Trump Is My President.” Some of them illustrate the slogan with a picture of an ethereal Christ laying both his hands on Trump’s shoulders. What begins as a risqué quip ends up as a religious icon. There is no line here between sacrilege and devotion, transgressive humor and religious veneration.

Just as Trump’s jokes can become literal, his ugly realities can be bathed in the soothing balm of laughter. Long before he ran for president, he was indulged on the late-night talk shows as the hilarious huckster. In 1986 Letterman tried repeatedly to get Trump to tell him how much money he had, and when he continually evaded the question, Letterman broke the tension with the laugh-line, “You act like you’re running for something.” In December 2005 Conan O’Brien asked him, “You also have an online school? Is that correct?” Trump replied, “Trump University—if you want to learn how to get rich.” The audience howled with laughter, presumably not because they thought he was kidding but because the very words “Trump University” are innately absurd. When he did that Top Ten List on Letterman in 2009, Trump’s comic financial advice included “For tip number four, simply send me $29.95.”

But these jokes came true. Trump wouldn’t say how much he was worth because his net worth was partly fictional. Trump did run for something. Trump University was an innately funny idea that people took seriously enough to enable Trump to rip them off. And Trump does want you to send him $29.95—the first thing you get on Trump’s official website is an insistent demand: “Donate Today.” This is the thing about Trump’s form of organized laughter, in which the idea of humor obscures the distinction between outlandish words and real-life actions. Sooner or later, the first becomes the second. The in-joke becomes the killer line.

March 21, 2024

Who Should Regulate Online Speech?

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Fintan O’Toole is the Advising Editor at The New York Review and a columnist for The Irish Times. His most recent book, We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland , was published in the US last year. (March 2024)

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A Sugary Bonbon of a Novel From a Legendary Foodie

In “The Paris Novel,” Ruth Reichl is a glutton for wish fulfillment.

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By Mattie Kahn

Mattie Kahn is the author of “Young and Restless: The Girls Who Sparked America’s Revolutions.”

THE PARIS NOVEL, by Ruth Reichl

Stella St. Vincent’s estranged mother dies and leaves her with an unusual bequest: She is to take her modest inheritance and go to Paris.

It’s not an obvious recipe for success, but it does make for an enticing narrative prompt. The heroine of Ruth Reichl’s “The Paris Novel” is not one for impulsive jaunts; her existence is rigidly ordered, a response to the tumult of a traumatic childhood — including episodes of sexual abuse that Reichl narrates in unexpected detail early in the novel. Still, Stella remains a dutiful daughter. Her boss at a small press encourages her to take the trip. She goes.

Stella arrives in 1980s France friendless and with almost no experience of gratification beyond that of a well-placed comma. No romance, no indulgence; she subsists on coffee, toast and boiled eggs in New York and cheap protein in Paris. “Pleasure,” Reichl writes, “was not part of her program.”

After a few weeks of old habits and dismal meals, Stella stumbles into a vintage store where she slips into a Dior dress. Like Cinderella, she cuts a deal: The imperious shopkeeper gets to dictate where Stella should go and what she should eat when she gets there. In exchange, Stella can be someone else for a night and return the dress at no cost the next morning.

Ever the rule-follower, she heads to the iconic Les Deux Magots as instructed, where an old art collector zeros in on her — and the dress. From there, the plot unfurls like a marathon tasting menu.

A former restaurant critic and magazine editor whose debut memoir, “Tender at the Bone,” remains one of the most piquant and delectable of the genre, Reichl peoples her new novel with giants of the Parisian food scene, including Richard Olney and Alain Passard. Their appearances provide a welcome hit of spice, balancing out a sequence of events so rich that I sometimes wondered whether I wanted to gobble the rest of the book down or push it aside, stuffed.

There are wish fulfillment fantasies, and then there’s “The Paris Novel,” in which a woman with no plans and no prospects escapes to Paris and finds not just a mentor turned patron, but a scatterbrained Virgil (in the form of a renowned bookseller, George Whitman), a father figure or two and a convenient romantic partner. Stella embarks on an art caper and develops an appetite for the earthiest delicacies. And magical couturiers aside, it’s the author who waves a magic wand: Despite Stella’s avowed abstemiousness, it turns out she has a phenomenal palate and considerable charm. What greater gifts could a Reichl heroine desire?

So Stella devours all in her path: foie gras, poems, lectures, ortolan, the intricacies of French bureaucracy, cheese and several mysteries of provenance. Antagonists are vanquished. The narrative is sweet, but reminded me less of Ladurée’s towers of pastel macarons than of New York’s old Krispy Kreme locations, where a cutout window let customers watch the doughnuts be fried and dunked. I read Reichl’s latest with a mental picture of her behind the glass, shellacking on the sugar glaze.

Still, Reichl has retained an enthusiastic and undeniable knack for describing food and its attendant thrills. Implausible twists and turns go down easier because Reichl keeps the wine — and mouthwatering prose — flowing.

You could quibble with the likelihood of Stella’s adventure or even wonder what kind of visa she used to enter France, but who can care about odds or immigration status when total transformation is on the menu? Treats don’t need logic, and “The Paris Novel” doesn’t, either. When a waiter drops an extra dessert on the table, better not send it back to the kitchen.

THE PARIS NOVEL | By Ruth Reichl | Random House | 278 pp. | $29

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