Robinson’s crisp, lyrical writing has long since earned her a place at the pinnacle of North American letters; nonetheless, she insists that it is character which drives her prose. We first meet the title character in her new novel as an anonymous child, unremarked and uncared for even by those the reader assumes to be her family. How unlike Ames, whose own voice speaks, strong and measured, from the pages of Gilead – the author of his own story in the most literal sense, through the medium of the letter. Lila, on the other hand, seems like a starved waif at the mercy of a dark wet night, cast out by cruel hands and swept up by rougher ones. The itinerant, scarred Doll steals this child away and draws her into a life of wandering, and wondering.

Alone again, Lila will one day wander into the town of Gilead and into the shelter of its church, where the Reverend Ames is performing a baptism. Readers of Robinson have met Lila before, of course: on the first page of Gilead, as Ames’s wife. There she was quoted as having told their son: ‘there are many ways to live a good life.’

Time and again, Lila’s tentative and loosely structured narrative returns to the importance of the fragile, often wordless connection that one individual can form with another. It is a connection often enough created through need; as a child, Lila is the manifestation of Doll’s need for companionship, just as Doll is the ministering angel conjured by Lila’s abandonment. ‘Doll may have been the loneliest woman in the world, and she was the loneliest child, and there they were, the two of them together, keeping each other warm in the rain.’ Doll, like Sylvie in Robinson’s début novel, House-keeping (1980), fashions herself a daughter in her own image. There is both fiercely maternal generosity and selfishness in the act of bringing a child into the life of the never-still, the never-safe – a life into which Lila feels she may well one day lead her own son.  

In her own way, Lila, like Ames in Gilead, frets incessantly at the meaning of inheritance. Yet while Ames shares not only his home and his vocation but even his name with his father, Lila knows nothing of her forebears. What does it mean for her to have had a father or a mother? As she transcribes the text of Ezekiel 16:6 on her tablet, practising her script, Lila comes to understand that someone must have cared for her in her infancy. In the unremembered years before Doll stole her away, someone bid her live, ‘though thou are in thy blood, live’. Housekeeping’s Ruthie believed that the imprint of those we have loved, remembered against the lids of our eyes or in the shadowed light of a night-lit window, is as real as their corporeal form. Is there a Lila – by another name – living in the mind’s eye of an anonymous mother?

We learn early on that the name Lila was chosen by Doll, at the suggestion of a good samaritan. It is only as she grows to adulthood that Lila begins to feel this name to be her own, made sacred when Ames addresses her: ‘Lila, if I may.’ His act of recognition is sealed by an inspired, spur-of-the-moment baptism, which, for Lila, is less about the grace of God than about the grace of an unsought and unaccountable new human bond.

You can say to yourself, I’m just a body that thinks and talks and seems to want its life, one more day of it. You don’t have to know why. Well, nothing could ever change if your body didn’t just keep you there not even knowing what it is you’re waiting for. Not even knowing that you’re waiting at all. Just there on the stoop in the moonlight licking up tears.

Lila’s wisdom is of a different kind from that offered by the philosophical and pious reverend; her observations slice through the fabric of the text, capturing sharp, contradictory emotions in the rhythms of a single sentence. Though no theologian, she contemplates the meaning and shape of ‘existence’ – as Ames teaches her to call it – every bit as seriously as he does.

Lila’s is the story of memory as much as anything, and it is she who knows, perhaps even better than Ames, that to pray is simply to remember. To pray is to recall the sensation of his winter coat upon her thin shoulders, ‘the feel of that coat, the weight of it’, like the feel of Doll’s arms wrapped around her as a feverish, rain-sodden, lonely girl.