Yes, I confess I had not read the 2005 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction until now, when it is nearly 2007, but in theory I have repented of this fact prior to my death and consequently cannot be held accountable for it in the book-lined heaven towards which I aspire.

Marilynne Robinson’s second work of fiction, Gilead, deserves both the Pulitzer and my monumentally-less-prestigious Repentance for Not Reading It Earlier. Admirers of her debut novel, Housekeeping, which garnered the Ernest Hemingway Foundation award for the best first novel from PEN American Center, a PEN/Faulkner fiction award nomination, the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and a Pulitzer Prize nomination, no less, have been equally rewarded in their patient wait for this quietly stunning, deeply compelling book.

The style of the novel is clean, careful and profound. It assumes the form of a long letter written by John Ames, a 76-year-old preacher, who has spent the majority of his life in Gilead, Iowa. Ames has been diagnosed with a heart problem and has little time to live; he writes to his son, the beloved product of a marriage to a much younger woman, and much too young himself to understand any fatherly information the elder Ames wishes to give him. Ames fills this gorgeous ‘letter’ with all the things he wishes he could pass on to his child: his own family history (his father and his grandfather preachers before him), impeccably composed and heartfelt descriptions of the events of his current waning days, and, most preciously, with the truths about life he has gathered—truths about his own life, about all human life, and about spiritual life.

But lest my opening paragraph about a book-lined heaven lead you astray, you need not be Christian, religious, nor even have significant appreciation for Christianity or religion in order to appreciate this book. Part of its strength is Ames’ deep love of the human and of worldly existence, which is the only appreciation you need share to be drawn into its pages. It must be said that the novel may be slow to capture you fully, but if you persist in putting together the mosaic of its prose, the last half of the book will be a rich reward. Mysteries of the past, like sacred mysteries, surface; some resolve fully, some remain partially obscured, the truth a conjecture of tangible facts.

I am tempted to compare the book to water—in its clarity, in its beauty, in the way water is both transparent and reflective, tossing the fragments of the sun, the sky, the heavens back upon themselves. Only after this comparison leapt to my mind did I recall Ames’s suggestion that, in a sense, all water holds the capacity to bless, that water is, in and of itself, a blessing. The link of metaphors holds. This book is a blessing.

Connexions has compiled a list of a few of the 75,000 memorable quotes and beautiful moments in this book; read a really spectacular review that makes me ashamed to be ticking on a keyboard at Eve’s Alexandria.