Home Marilynne Robinson Virago, 336pp, £16.99

Return of the prodigal

Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard is a 20th-century novel that adopts the form of the 19th-century novel to describe change in Italy, and Sicily in particular, during that century. At the ball which features at the climax of the 19th-century section, an aside disrupts the grandeur of prose and setting: "From the ceiling the gods, reclining on gilded couches, gazed down smiling and inexorable as a summer sky. They thought themselves eternal; but a bomb manufactured in Pittsburgh, Penn was to prove the contrary in 1943."

The disruptive moment in Marilynne Robinson's third novel, Home, occurs early on. The novel is seen through the eyes of Glory, the youngest of the Reverend Boughton's eight children, who has returned to Gilead, a town in rural Iowa, to live in the house where she grew up and care for her invalid father. Together they read the papers and listen to the radio, leading a life somewhere on the spectrum between peaceful and boring until her brother Jack, the black sheep of the family, returns after a 20-year absence. His youthful scandal was getting a local girl pregnant and refusing to marry her, and now he has other worries that he won't share. On his arrival, Glory's thoughts about Milton (she used to be an English teacher) give way to dialogue about washing machines and the Reverend Boughton punctures the simplicity of his surroundings with exclamations such as, "I believe the threat of atomic war is very real!"

The surprise of the intrusion of the modern world is a product of Robinson's style. Your response to the following sentence should tell you whether or not Robinson is the novelist for you:

So while he napped, prayed, composed himself, set aside grievances and doubts, suffered the pangs of anticipation, sought footing in the general blessedness of his life for a posture of heroic and fatherly grace, and perhaps skirted dangerously near rapture of some part of the sensorium given over to grand emotion - her father's silences were never merely silences - she walked over to Ames's house.

After "composed himself" the clauses advance gracefully in balanced pairs, but is it too stately a sentence to describe the simple action of Glory visiting a neighbour? Only a keen reader of 17th-century poetry, the Bible, Calvin and the American Transcendentalists could hope to catch all the clues in Robinson's sentences. Some cadences are easy: when Glory considers that "the past was a very fine thing, in its place", it is reassuring to be presented with "time's winged chariot" later on. Without the correct crib to hand, however, some passages seem woolly, leading one to wonder if some of the praise for Robinson's work derives from a reverence for things not understood. Given her talent for allusion, she can be sly, as in this exchange between Glory and Jack:

"Well," she said. "I wouldn't care if you were a petty thief."

He smiled. "That's very subjunctive of you."

Home is a companion to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead, in which Reverend Boughton's best friend, Reverend Ames, writes an extended letter to his young son. The books cover the same events but Gilead is more wide-ranging, partly due to its first-person form as Ames digresses on past and present, theology and personal anecdote. Ames is a livelier, more learned companion than Glory, whose interior monologue is punctuated by "Dear Gods" and "Dear Lords" - the nearest Robinson comes to narrative intimacy.

Glory's limited point of view adds to Home's sense of being set in a claustrophobic world. In Robinson's work, home is both a comforting and a limiting place. It is particularly closed in this novel, as a random but representative set of the beginnings of sections shows: "Glory took Jack upstairs to the room she had prepared for him/In the afternoon she went out to work in the garden/At dusk Jack came downstairs in his suit and tie/The next morning she rose early/The next morning Jack was out in the garden early . . ."

In the setting of this soporific routine, Jack becomes an increasingly troubled figure, his unstable identity reflected in shifting analogies that cast him as Prometheus, Raskolnikov and Cary Grant. At one moment he says in despair: "I think hope is the worst thing in the world. I really do. It makes a fool of you while it lasts. And then when it's gone, it's like there's nothing left of you at all." At the end of Home, Glory discovers what is really wrong with Jack and imagines a moment in the future which will make it better.

All three of Robinson's novels, and particularly Housekeeping, her first book, end with this expression of hope, which is put so simply and so directly that it is worth any tedium which has gone before.

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