I should perhaps have been forewarned by the blurbs on the back of Gilead that hailed it as "radiant,' "incandescent," "rapturous," "lyrical," "astonishing" and "perfect" but I have been burned before by stupendous comments that accompany rather ordinary books. I should have taken into account Marilynne Robinson's first novel Housekeeping, generally regarded as a contemporary classic. I was not and did not. I picked the book up with my usual mild skepticism. Within a few pages I was crying. It is rare to find anything in American life that is at once tender and scrupulously honest. Gilead is both of these things and encountering it is shocking and revelatory.

Gilead is a kind of epistolary novel. It takes the form of one long letter from the aging, ailing Congregationalist minister John Ames to his young son, whom he knows he will not see grow to manhood. The letter is to tell the youngster of his "begats." "My mother's father was a preacher, and my father's father was, too, and his father before him, and before that, nobody knows, but I wouldn't hesitate to guess," Ames writes. There is much family history to tell, for indeed, the Ames family destiny intersects poignantly with America's. Ames's father and grandfather were both involved in the Civil War and the struggle against slavery, though they had a sharp break after the war, with the younger Ames turning pacifist and allying himself with the Quakers.

The pages that brought me to tears recount the trek young John Ames and his father, years after the break with the grandfather, took from Gilead, Iowa into Kansas to find and honor his grave. The whole book is full of such luminously beautiful passages:

That graveyard was about the loneliest place you could imagine. If I were to say it was going back to nature, you might get the idea that there was some sort of vitality about the place. But it was parched and sun-stricken. It was hard to imagine the grass had ever been green. Everywhere you stepped, little grasshoppers would fly up by the score, making that snap they do, like striking a match. My father put his hands in his pockets and looked around and shook his head. Then he started cutting the brush back with a hand scythe he had brought, and we set up the markers that had fallen over – most of the graves were just outlined with stones, with no names or dates or anything on them at all. My father said to be careful where I stepped. There were small graves here and there that I hadn't noticed at first, or I hadn't quite realized what they were. I certainly didn't want to walk on them, but until he cut the weeds down I couldn't tell where they were, and I knew I had stepped on some of them, and I felt sick. Only in childhood have I felt guilt like that, and pity. I still dream about it. My father always said when someone dies the body is just a suit of old clothes the spirit doesn't want anymore. But there we were, half killing ourselves to find a grave, and as cautious as we could be about where we put our feet.

Gilead is fiction, but like all great fiction, it is also philosophy, and includes many lessons about faith, perseverance, misunderstandings, and the complicated, infuriating ties of love. It contains enough striking reflections on God and the nature of existence to make believers of its readers. Ames tells his son "One great benefit of a religious vocation is that it helps you concentrate." Similarly, the book creates a space and pace that are conducive to reflection that honors the profundity of the lessons it relates.

About his older brother Edward, Ames writes "There were two sisters and brother between [me and older brother Edward], all carried off by diphtheria in less than two months. He knew them and I, of course, did not, so that was another great difference. Though it was rarely spoken of, I was always aware that there had been a crowded, cheerful life the three of them remembered well and I could not really imagine." Sentences like these can't be rushed over; they contain too much, vast worlds of meaning and longing.

Gilead also reveals to the uninitiated the thrilling history of the Mid-West as a place of great courage and hardship during our country's formative struggles. (In addition to debunking the myth of Mid-West sleepy parochialism, Robinson gives lie to the idea of the difficulty of having a "good" narrator. Ames may well be a kind of modern saint but he is just as complex and beguiling in his voice as any number of ordinary and extraordinary sinners.)

In the middle of the novel Ames's attention shifts from the memories of his father and grandfather, to the return of his old friend Boughton's prodigal son. The strange tension of the book slackens a bit, and I found myself longing for the way Robinson had woven together History, and her characters' personal histories. But in unraveling the mysteries of Jack Boughton's lonely existence, Robinson connects it to American's troubled past, so that the end is every bit as moving as the beginning.