Candi's Reviews > Lila

"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."

Lila understands what it means to be lonely. She knows what it means to connect with another human soul to overcome that utter loneliness. Lila takes us on her journey and it is one of beauty and understanding and developing faith, not just in God but in the human spirit itself. Despite hardship and neglect, can a person truly learn to trust another? Ultimately, this is what the heart yearns for and what Lila seeks throughout her life.

Lila, born into poverty and neglect, is rescued and raised by an older woman named Doll. It becomes necessary to their survival to lead a life wandering from one place to the next in order to avoid detection. Doll is determined to protect Lila from those that had failed to provide her with the most basic of human needs, including love. The two attach themselves to a band of drifters and lead a harsh life, but one that allows them to form a bond that will always remain within Lila’s heart long after she must strike out on her own. Alone in the world, Lila searches for an identity, she longs for that human connection that sustains her, sustains all of us. Drifting into the small mid-western town of Gilead, the town we encountered in the book of that same title, Lila decides to settle for a bit. "… she wanted to stay in one place for a while. The loneliness was bad, but it was better than anything else she could think of. It was probably the loneliness that made her walk the mile or so into town every few days just to look at the houses and stores and the flower gardens. She never meant to talk to anybody." Then one day while in town, Lila seeks shelter from the rain and enters the church. Thus begins one of the most beautiful human connections in literature as Lila meets the Reverend John Ames. Lila is full of mistrust towards others. John Ames is gentle and patient and full of wisdom – wisdom that he doesn’t preach but quietly shares with humility and after much contemplation. He makes no demands. John is not a stranger to loneliness himself and Lila’s recognizes this. "He looked as if he’d had his share of loneliness, and that was all right. It was one thing she understood about him. She liked his voice. She liked the way he stood next to her as if there was a pleasure for him in it." Lila, not formally educated, but with her own brand of intellect based on experience, reasoning and inquisitiveness, will develop a spiritual rapport with John that is moving and simply powerful.

This novel, published after Gilead, is set in a time prior to the events occurring in that outstanding work of fiction. While Gilead was told from John’s point of view, Lila is a third person narrative which focuses on Lila’s life. It highlights her own perspective of those events leading up to the time she meets John and their early life together. The story is told with a stream of consciousness feel to it that alternates between past and present. Robinson draws a portrait of Lila that illustrates her past struggles and how these juxtapose with her current attempts to overcome loneliness and mistrust. This is not an easy battle for Lila and we, along with John, are witness to her lapses back to the familiar and painful feelings.

"The problem is, she thought, that if someday she opened the front door and there, where the flower gardens and the fence and the gate ought to be, was that old life, the raggedy meadows and pastures and the cornfields and the orchards, she might just set the child on her hip and walk out into it, the buzz and the smell and the damp of it, the breath of it like her own breath, her own sweat. Stepping back into the loneliness, a dreadful thing, like walking into cold water, waiting for the numbness to set in that was the body taking the care it could, so that what you knew you didn’t have to feel."

After much reflection, I really must change my rating to 5 stars. This book and the entire trilogy, including Gilead and Home, are definitely worthy of that rating. Highly recommended.