“I just been wondering lately why things happen the way they do,” Lila observes to Reverend Ames, when, as a newcomer to Gilead-she’s taken up residence at an abandoned shack a few miles outside town-she stops by the widower’s house unannounced, to his alternating delight and embarrassment. The same night she is rescued and carried off by Doll, a poor drifter who becomes like a mother to the girl, and names her Lila.

Somebody had shouted, Shut that thing up or I’ll do it!” Treated worse than a stray dog, the girl doesn’t know who her family is, or even her own name. Will it do her more harm or good if she howls to be let back in? “She couldn’t holler anymore and they didn’t hear her anyway, or they might and that would make things worse. In the novel’s wrenching opening, we bear witness to Lila’s memory of herself as a girl shivering outside a backwoods cabin at night. Louis brothel, but returning always to the gruff but loving woman, called Doll, who raised her.

As she prepares for the child’s arrival, her thoughts eddy through her distant past as an itinerant farm worker during the great dust storms of the Depression and her subsequent years in a St. The novel traces the life of the indigent Lila from about the age of 5 in 1920 through her marriage to the elderly Reverend Ames and the birth of their son 30 years later. In that first novel set in the hamlet of Gilead, as well as the second (2008’s Home), Lila Ames was a rough-edged, elusive figure, a mystery unresolved: Who was she and how did she come to marry the Reverend Ames? In Lila, Robinson’s deeply moving new novel, we at last come to know her and to witness the struggles of the Ameses’ most unusual love story, one shaped in no small measure by the questions Robinson has asked for her entire career: What is the meaning of suffering? Do any of us have hope of redemption? Out of this sojourn came Gilead, the story of the Reverend John Ames, pastor of a Congregationalist church in a small Iowa prairie town, father of a young boy and husband to a surprisingly young wife. Then, despite Housekeeping’s rapturous critical reception, she focused on nonfiction, eschewing the writing of further novels until, in the early 2000s, the voice of an elderly preacher came to her when she unexpectedly found herself alone for a few days during a trip. Her first novel, Housekeeping, which appeared in 1980, began as a series of metaphors, an exercise she’d never planned to develop as a novel. Marilynne Robinson, one of our finest writers of contemporary American fiction, is, to hear her tell it, something of an accidental novelist.

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