I can’t feel as happy as I am.” Somehow these simple words express her triumph over loneliness and her persistent vulnerability to it. Lila even says “I love you” without cliché: “I can’t love you as much as I love you. There is the perfectly paced sentence that describes time’s surreptitious progress: “There was the clock ticking, steady as could be, and time passing, and no sign of anything else happening at all, but then in two days there would be the shadow of dust again, anywhere you happened to look for it.”

What would she do”, sounds bereft and animated all at once.Īnd yet, Lila manages to be a sumptuous, graceful, and ultimately life-affirming novel that earns the muted, but convincing happiness of its concluding pages: “And here were the two of them together in this warm light, the same dread feeding on the same hope, married.” This is typical of the way Robinson’s elegantly crafted prose weighs difficult and even contradictory ideas and feelings. Even after Lila proposes marriage, she doesn’t settle down so much as pause, ready to leave at a second’s notice. Robinson’s tough questions inspire tough answers. When you’re scalded, touch hurts, it makes no difference if it’s kindly meant.”For Lila, the hope embodied by Ames, like that provided by Doll’s rescue, challenges her deepest sense of self: “But she kept thinking, What happens when somebody isn’t herself anymore …” The choice is not an easy one for the self-protective Lila. For Lila herself, this means reconciling her cheerless past – which ends in a dismal St Louis brothel – with the possibility of happiness with John Ames: “I got so much life behind me,” she says evenly. Her characters, raised on differently seasoned diets of poverty, solitude and death, are constantly alive to suffering, but the best ones perceive this as sometimes leading towards bliss. Why humans bother is one of Robinson’s primary preoccupations.

Lila marilynne robinson