One of the pleasures of conducting
a monthly book discussion group is discovering books that I would never have
read on my own. I first started going to a book club in 1961 when Nedra and I
attended the Unitarian Fellowship in Westwood, California. We met Peter Gary, a Holocaust survivor who
had studied composition with Kodaly and Bartok in Budapest. After his
liberation from Bergen-Belsen he helped as a translator for the US Army and was
rewarded with a scholarship to Paris where he got his doctorate in composition. In the US he did not like teaching music and
he didn’t want to write music for Hollywood, so he became a businessman making
art frames. He told me that he had a book discussion group and I started
attending. It was wonderful. I got to read
occasional classics and new fiction and non-fiction recommended to Peter. Discussing a book focuses attention on more
than the plot and how to describe it. I learned that we interpret books
differently and we bring as much to books as we take away from them.
When we
moved to Stony Brook, NY, we attended the Unitarian Fellowship in that village
and I joined the book discussion group led by a retired dentist, Ernie
Kamperman. We had wonderful discussions
and when Ernie died, I took over the discussion group and kept it going until
we retired and moved to Bloomington, Indiana. Now we are in our fifth year of
the book discussion group at the Unitarian-Universalist Church in
Bloomington. What surprised me was that
they didn’t have a book discussion group when we came so I started one. We alternate
a book of fiction one month with a book of non-fiction the following
month. Books are suggested by the
members and the person whose book is due to be discussed tells us why that book
was chosen. We then discuss it with
everyone having an opportunity to enter as they desire. We hold the discussion at our home because we
have a large living room and one of the features of our book club is Nedra’s
delightful cookies and cakes that she bakes and varies each month.
Our most
recent book was chosen because it won a
Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Marilynne Robinson is the author of Gilead (2004) a short novel discussing a town by that name in
western Iowa. It is a story of three
generations of a family who lived there.
They are all named John Ames which makes it difficult sometimes to know
who is being discussed, a problem my father and I had as I grew up because we
both called ourselves Elof (my father did not use Axel, his first name). The first John Ames was an abolitionist who
went to Kansas in the 1850s and joined John Brown’s raiders attacking slaveholders
and freeing their slaves and providing safe routes in the Underground Railroad
that got them safely to Canada. During
the Civil War the older Ames had an eye shot out and he became a fearsome
preacher, teaching the fear of God rather God’s love. He fought with neighbors
and his relatives and wasn’t a good parent. Eventually he left his family and
went back to Kansas to die. The Civil
War John Ames had a son who became a pacifist rejecting his father's militant outlook. He in turn had two sons, Edward and John.
Edward Ames was a brilliant student in school and was sent to Germany to
get a college education. He came back as
an atheist, enamored of the higher criticism of German scholarship that made it
impossible for him to believe the bible was dictated by God and instead he
believed it was cobbled together from isolated versions (that the German scholars saw as myths )and stories that became
the Hebrew bible. Edward’s brother, John
Ames becomes a Congregational minister like his Civil War grandfather, but he is a
pacifist and like his father he is turned off to violence even for a good cause. His doubts about
his grandfather also lead to doubts about his vocation as a minister but no matter how
many doubts he harbors about God, he refuses to adopt the atheism of his
brother.
The novel is written as a memoir, a
sort of amalgam of diary, letter writing, and personal reflection without
subdivisions into chapters. The memoir
is by the nephew of the atheist, who becomes a minister with considerable
doubts about his abilities to help others, about God’s existence, and about the
human condition. He writes the memoir
for his young son who will still not be an adult when the memoir-writing John Ames dies of congestive heart failure. I
like this approach but it is unusual for a work of fiction. Most novels I think of as tableaux where we
are invisible witnesses and eavesdroppers on scenes and conversations in a
narrative that is leading to some resolution or epiphany. Robinson’s approach I have only encountered in
a few books over my 65 years of reading fiction and non-fiction. The third John Ames I find appealing because he
reminds me of Horton Colbert, the agnostic minister of the Westwood Unitarian
Fellowship whose sermons sometimes rambled but made me aware of the tiny
surprises and events of life, like watching ants struggling with a heavy burden
or being interrupted by a visit of a hummingbird by his kitchen window. In Gilead, a dying farm village, life is
largely composed of such tastes of life that take the edge off the
insecurities, repetitive set-backs, and inevitable dissolution of our lives as
we close out our life cycle. In its quirky way it celebrates life.
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