Gilead

　　有一位名叫約翰．艾姆斯的傳教士，他77歲，有一個年輕的妻子和7歲的兒子。他隨時有心臟病發作而死的可能，因此在生日來臨之際，他拿起筆，給兒子寫了一封信──等兒子長大了就能看懂了。他在信?回顧自己和祖父、父親的一生，表達了他對生命與存在的思考。在寫信過程中，他碰到了自己有生以來最大的精神危機。跟他同名的年輕人──他老朋友的兒子──回到了小鎮上，令約翰．艾姆斯想到了一些痛苦往事和難測的未來，而且，他妻子對這個年紀相仿的年輕人頗有好感。為了理解與寬恕，他發現必須對自己有一個徹底的認識。

　　羅賓遜獲知得到普立茲獎後強調：「這是一本安靜的書，既不憤怒、嚇人，也不古怪、詭異。」

　　In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He "preached men into the Civil War," then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father--an ardent pacifist--and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be relics from the fight between the abolitionists and those settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the union as a slave state. And he tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend's wayward son.

　　This is also the tale of another remarkable vision--not a corporeal vision of God but the vision of life as a wondrously strange creation. It tells how wisdom was forged in Ames's soul during his solitary life, and how history lives through generations, pervasively present even when betrayed and forgotten.

　　Gilead is the long-hoped-for second novel by one of our finest writers, a hymn of praise and lamentation to the God-haunted existence that Reverend Ames loves passionately, and from which he will soon part.