The old hymn is wrong, or so implies Home, a successor to Marilynne Robinson's prizewinning Gilead (2004): there is no balm in Gilead “to make the wounded whole.” The two novels have roughly the same cast of characters and the time presents of the two novels coincide. In both novels, the catalyst of anxiety and action is Jack Boughton, the long-absent son of Reverend Robert Boughton and godson of John Ames, the narrator of Gilead. Boughton and Ames are lifelong friends and theological sparring partners. Both are now retired ministers, the former from his Presbyterian church and the latter from the Congregationalist church. As both novels open, the prodigal son, Jack, has come home after twenty years' absence.

Though Home is profligate with moral and theological concerns, one of them is Robinson's exploration of the romance of the prodigal son. Not surprisingly, prodigals have usually left for good reasons and the effect of their return intensifies, as much as it relieves, familial, usually Oedipal, tensions. Indeed, one of the truths that Home explores is that neither father nor son is without fault or sympathy in the struggle. One other dimension is the relationship between the kind and understanding sister, Glory, and her older brother, Jack, whose mysterious aura gradually wanes as he brings trouble for his father and for his sister. Having taken a back seat to the son's claims on the father's supposed love, Glory has also suffered a great hurt – the break-up of a long engagement – and has also come home to recuperate and, she is afraid, never to leave again. In general, then, the story of the prodigal son reveals that “home” and “family” are problems as much as they are solutions to the spiritual dilemmas of their members.

Not surprisingly, there is not a lot of “action” in Home, just as there is not in Gilead. But the world of Robinson's first novel was beautifully furnished with theological and religious speculation, as well as intermittently – and subtly – bringing in the complex historical backdrop to the history of Iowa, where Gilead is located, and to the Ames family's connection with “Bleeding Kansas” of the 1850s. Reverend Boughton, however, is less intellectual and, in truth, less interesting than John Ames. In fact the reader may come to feel that part of Jack's tragedy is that he has the “wrong” father. Ames battles through to an understanding of his godson, but “old” Boughton, who claims to love Jack beyond all else, repeatedly exacts a psychological revenge upon his returned son.

In Gilead Jack finally confesses to Ames his real reason for coming home – he wants to see if he can imagine his wife and young son living there. Thus Jack's return is part of a test for his hometown, his father and his family. But it has to do not with whether Gilead (a blank place in both novels) is a “nice” place to live as such; it is really whether an interracial marriage and a mixed-race child might exist there with some modicum of acceptance. Jack's estranged wife is African American, something we know from Gilead but do not learn until the last pages of Home. Indeed, one of the most subtly telling moments in Home comes when Jack has to bite his tongue at his father's distressingly uncomprehending reactions to the Montgomery Bus Boycott which is being shown on the television set that Jack and Glory have bought him. Jack never does reveal to his father or even his sister that his wife is black and so is their son.

Finally, it is such extreme – some might say inhuman – reticence that also makes us understand why Jack is so strange and difficult. He cannot even own up to his own best moral instincts. He and Glory get to know and love each other as they care for their father, but neither ever really comes clean with the other. The home that promises “a place to come to” fails to offer a safe haven where their relationship can take root. The tragic failure of the whole family is ultimately one of trust – of each other and of themselves. And yet, at the end of the novel, Glory imagines the time when Jack's young son will come to Gilead to see where his father once lived. She imagines meeting him then. The son thinks,

This is a powerful ending. But though it is perhaps theologically appropriate, it is unearned in fictional terms.