Gilead was widely and wonderfully well received. Stacy Carson Hubbard in her review entitled, “The Balm in Gilead,” writes that the story of John Ames “unfolds in a ruminative style, full of pithy vernacularism and homiletic wisdom.” Hubbard stresses that “Ames's tale is not so much a celebration of goodness as it is a celebration of complexity and ambiguity.” The novel, she writes, is “a meditation on the meaning of fatherhood, both literal and figurative. . . . Every father here is as much a mystery to his child as God is to humanity, and every son is in need of that 'boundless compassion' which Karl Barth—our narrator's favorite theologian—identifies with the radical otherness of God.” Hubbard concludes that Robinson's novel is “remarkable and redemptive,” a work that “invites us, with a kind of understated ecstasy, to contemplate the mysteries of being in the world.”

Thomas Meaney...