Can an interesting book be made out of a boring life? Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead tells the story of the Reverend John Ames, a man who has spent almost his entire life in an obscure small town, preaching every Sunday and leading a modest, repetitive existence almost entirely devoid of external drama. One of his most moving memories is a childhood journey with his father to his grandfather’s grave — an event that, in another novel, might have been no more than an episode, but here grows into an almost formative experience.

The book takes the form of a letter written by the elderly and ailing pastor to his young son. Ames knows that he will probably not be able to accompany the child as he grows up, so he tries to leave him something resembling a spiritual testament: a collection of memories, admonitions, reflections and warnings about life. The question, however, is whether such a life can become a genuinely interesting novel. Of course it can. Literature has repeatedly proved that it can extract an essence from everyday life, from small gestures and apparently insignificant events. One need only think of James Joyce’s Ulysses or Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time — books that draw vast territories of memory, consciousness and emotion from minor experiences.

The problem, then, is not that Gilead portrays a quiet life with little outward spectacle. The problem is rather that Marilynne Robinson — at least for me — does not extract enough tension, mystery or intellectual energy from that everyday existence. The protagonist is modest, gentle, religious and cautious. One might even perversely suppose that his caution in life arises from a deep conviction that eternal life must be earned through the devout torment of daily monotony. Ames seems like a man who avoids life more than he lives it. He is neither an outstanding intellectual, nor an eccentric adventurer, nor a figure torn apart by dramatic contradictions.

One may get the impression that Robinson very much wanted to write a serious and “important” book — the kind that seems almost automatically to demand a place on a school reading list. And school reading lists can be very different things: sometimes they open the mind, and sometimes they become a snobbish ordeal for a reader who knows they are dealing with something significant, but not necessarily something alive. I am not claiming that Gilead is devoid of value. It contains beautiful passages, a calm rhythm and a consistently maintained tone of spiritual testament. The problem is that this philosophy of life did not captivate me. Gilead is a novel about a life that perhaps deserves respect, but I am not certain that, in this form, it deserves a novel.