Amazing Grace.(Home)(Book review)

Byline: MEGAN O'GRADY editor: Valerie Steiker

With her latest book, Home, the celebrated novelist Marilynne Robinson lives up to her dazzling reputation.

Any novel from Marilynne Robinson arrives with a sense of the miraculous. More than two decades passed between the publication of her quietly earth-shattering debut, Housekeeping, a book that remains a modern classic, and its triumphant, expansive follow-up, Gilead, a Pulitzer Prize--winner in 2005. We can be grateful to not have to wait so long for Home (FSG), a slender but potent return to the same sleepy Iowa town of the mid-1950s, in which the winds of social change only occasionally whistle across the sunflower-filled prairie.

A graceful variation on the parable of the prodigal son, Home begins with the return of a daughter, the youngest of the eight children of Robert Boughton, a former pastor. "At 38 she was still wary of country songs and human interest stories," Robinson writes of Glory, whose single chance at romance ended in disillusionment, and whose acceptance of her role as caretaker carries a strong whiff of resignation. Then her brother Jack ...