About two years ago Amazon.com told me to read a novel called Gilead. This was not, I should say, a polite suggestion. They (if you can refer to Amazon as a they) put it at the top of my recommended reading list. They sent me emails about it. It was on the first screen every time I went to the website. It was getting ridiculous.
'Look, it's about an old preacher in Kansas,' I said, 'I'm not interested.'
'Oh, yes you are,' they responded, 'We know what you like.'
I moved it to my shopping cart, thinking it would shut them up, but they were relentless.
'Really, this is not my thing,' I told them, 'It's about God and faith. Come on, that's not me.'
'Have we ever led you wrong before?' they asked.
I ignored them, hoping that in time other recommendations would push it down the list until it would finally disappear into oblivion, but they insisted.
'I seriously think you should check your programming,' I said, 'This is about fathers and sons. I am so not interested. Do you see my use of italics there? On the so? That's because I'm not. Interested.'
'But we know what you like,' they repeated, 'This is definitely you.'
'I highly doubt that,' I retorted.
'I highly doubt that,' they mimicked.
I was fed up. Enough was enough. I bought it, shipped it, and placed it finally on my bookshelf, where it sat for months. Until one day, I opened it.
And I read.
I had not read a novel in this way for so, so long. Each page put me in a deep, pensive state. What's more: it made me reach. I felt my mind reaching. It was strange to me, in the literal sense of the word: it was about God and the Bible and honoring thy father and... it was about finding grace. It was philosophy, fictionalized in a way that allows us to see how the concepts take shape.
I think what surprised me the most about it was its unconventional approach to storytelling. That is to say, I think we read most novels and we identify - or hope to identify - with the protagonist. But who can identify with a 76-year old, dying, small-town preacher? The effect is that I recognized almost nothing of myself in this person except for his humanity; and that, let me tell you, is a powerful thing.
There were two ideas in the novel which especially stayed in my mind because, I suppose, they struck me as completely new concepts. One was about the Ten Commandments, in which he (the main character, because the author is a woman) remarks that it seems to him that the first five have to do with the proper worship of God (thou shalt have no other gods, remember the Sabbath, etc.) and the last five have to do with right conduct towards other people (thou shalt not murder, commit adultery, steal, bear false witness, or covet thy neighbor's house/wife). I had never thought of them in quite this way, but to be honest, I also could not name more than 3 or 4 Commandments prior to reading Gilead.
The other idea - the one that floored me - was contained in a long discourse about the Fifth Commandment, the one that instructs us to Honor Thy Father and Mother. Ultimately, he concludes that a parent must love a child - this is what a parent owes to the child - whereas the child must simply exist. To exist is sufficient, it is enough.
I cannot express how this idea filled me with a certainty of its truth, and how accurately this describes my feelings for my own daughter.
And how, in this tiny book, I remembered that reading is not about intellectualizing ideas; it is about finding something in the story, in the text, that reminds us of who we are. That is grace, and it is remarkable.
Thank you, Amazon, you stubborn bastards.
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