Home

If you’re looking for a sleep aid, consider Marilynne Robinson’s soporific new novel, Home. John Ames, the minister whose inner life Robinson illuminated so beautifully in her Pulitzer-winning Gilead, returns, this time as a bit player in the long-winded family drama of his dying friend Robert Boughton. There’s much sighing, hand-wringing, and scriptural debate, none of it precisely boring. But the novel lacks Ames’ soulful narrative voice, which is what made Gilead such a treat. B