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Family Dynamics
What Do We Mean When We Say We're Going Home?
In Marilynne Robinson's "Home," siblings go back to a childhood house.
Posted February 3, 2022 Reviewed by Abigail Fagan
Key points
- Pulitzer-prize-winner Robinson digs into the dynamics of house, home, family, and community.
- The book explores the cultural meanings of where we live and with whom and how these define our lives.
- Siblings Jack and Glory are pulled toward the home of their childhood, trying to complete unfinished lives.
“Weary or bitter of bewildered as we may be, God is faithful. He lets us wander so we will know what it means to come home.” —Marilyn Robinson, Home.
Two siblings return to their childhood home. One is in her late 30s, the other his mid-40s. Their other six brothers and sisters have created their own homes, found their own lives. These two, though—Glory and Jack—remain untethered. Glory’s relationship didn't work out and she left a teaching position to come home and care for her dying father. Things in general haven’t worked out for Jack, and we’re not sure why he came home. To make a final accounting? To atone for a life full of missteps and misdeeds? To reconnect? To see if it ever could be his home?
At the root of Home, a quiet, thoughtful novel by Marilynne Robinson, is the question: What is home? Do Glory and Jack return home or do they just come back to a house? The house is not the one Glory has imagined in her future—minimalist, clean, airy, with a porch on the front and a patio at the back. A place to make her own memories. It is, instead, reality. Overstuffed, full of furniture and knickknacks, an ugly purple rug, and childhood memories of her siblings, mother, and her minister father. She dreamed of making her own home, but a failed romance and a sick father have hijacked her plans, so here she is, in a house she thought she’d left behind, a place that once was home but now is a symbol of her obligation to her family. She ends up the parental caretaker because she has no other obligations. That is, she’s unmarried and has no kids. In 1950s America, that meant life had sailed past her.
“What an embarrassment that was, being somewhere because there was nowhere else for you to be,” Robinson writes.
As for Jack, the house was never home; he never felt like he belonged in the family. When his siblings played in the house as children, he hid, alone, in the barn. He loved them all in his own way, but he’s troubled and, worse, unconventional. He’s not comfortable being committed to anything, let alone an old farmhouse in a small, conservative mid-century Iowa town.
Is a House a Home? Is a Home a House?
Robinson spends 300-plus pages eyeing one family’s ideas of house and home, digging deep into the ambiguities between the two, the cultural meanings ascribed to where we live, and with whom. She doesn't make the house all that charming, hardly the American dream, but still shows that both Jack and Glory are pulled toward this place, looking to complete unfinished lives. Their father, here mostly referred to as The Old Man, is slowly fading, but his influence, both pragmatic and spiritual, is strong.
Home is a counterpoint to Robinson’s Gilead, which earned her the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, and takes place in the same time period; the two books together give you a view of the family from inside and out. John Ames, the narrator of Gilead, is a neighbor here. Religion is an undercurrent—Ames and The Old Man are both ministers, and Jack and Glory are well versed in the Bible. Theological discussions circle around the push and pull of life experiences, family dynamics, and sibling relationships. The community is a bit of a quiet Greek chorus, following the characters, loving, supporting, judging, questioning. It's an unnerving mix.
Home is meditative, full of intense conversation, occasional humor, and the slow dawning of reality. We’re left to create our own definitions of home, and Robinson sends us in too many directions to allow us easy answers.
