Moral of the Story
‘Lila,’ by Marilynne Robinson Regionalism has always played an important part in American literature, with, say, William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County the iconic Southern example. Those who have read Marilynne Robinson’s radiant Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “Gilead,” will remember that imaginary town in southernmost Iowa, near the conjunction of Missouri, Kansas and Nebraska — Plains country, partially Southern in spirit and looking west, thereby broadly embodying the essential rural Midwestern America at a seminal period, from the Depression to around 1950. Although American literature isn’t usually known for its religious and philosophical novels, we might think of certain essential works, particularly of Melville and Hawthorne, that concern grace and redemption. Robinson’s new novel, “Lila,” combines these regional and spiritual strains of American writing. Two families are of special interest in the town of Gilead, the Boughtons and the Ameses, each having several gener