There is,indeed, a balm in Gilead.The wait since 1981 and Housekeeping is over. It is a challenging book to read, rich and full of new discoveries with each new reading. This is a wonderful story, beautifully written. Without mushy sentimentality, we feel the ache he feels anticipating his absence from the boy's growing up. His hopes and dreams for the boy's future are the most poignant. The boy and his mother have been a blessing in his later years, and his deep love for them both is painted in the gratitude he expresses for this gift from God. He wants to leave an account of himself for this son who will never really know him. The reason for the letter is Rev.Ames's failing health. Woven into all this are several amazing tales of adventure, and quite a bit of subtle humor. and his steadfast faith in God, and the role that faith plays in Rev. the family story, the story of the town Gilead, his observations of life, friendship, society, history, rural life, the nature of love, jealousy, and friendship, the reconciliation of fears and disappointments. To this boy he leaves his last treasures. In this collection of letters to his young son, the voice of Rev. Gilead is the long-hoped-for second novel by one of our finest writers, a hymn of praise and lamentation to the God-haunted existence that Reverend Ames loves passionately, and from which he will soon part.Įxquisite, humorous, though-provoking experience It tells how wisdom was forged in Ames's soul during his solitary life, and how history lives through generations, pervasively present even when betrayed and forgotten.

This is also the tale of another remarkable vision, not a corporeal vision of God but the vision of life as a wondrously strange creation. And he tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend's wayward son. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father, an ardent pacifist, and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be relics from the fight between the abolitionists and those settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the union as a slave state. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He 'preached men into the Civil War', then, at age 50, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. National Book Critics Circle Award, Fiction, 2005In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears.

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