Marilynne Robinson’s New Novel 'Jack': An American Romeo and Juliet
An artistic representation of interracial intimacy. Creative Commons.
Marilynne Robinson won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005 for her novel Gilead. Jack is the fourth book in Robinson’s Gilead series. It will be released for publication on Sept. 29.
(REVIEW) Gilead (2004) is an epistolary novel narrated by a dying, 76-year-old Congregational minister, the Reverend John Ames, and addressed to his 7-year-old son. In Gilead, Jack is a figure who vexes and grieves Reverend Ames. Jack is Ames’s godson and the prodigal son of his best friend, the Reverend Robert Boughton. In a 2008 interview with The Paris Review, Robinson vowed never to write a book from Jack’s point of view.
“I would lose Jack if I tried to get too close to him,” Robinson said. “He’s alienated in a complicated way. Other people don’t find him comprehensible, and he doesn’t find them comprehensible.”
Now, Robinson has done what she said would be impossible a decade ago. She makes Jack the narrator of her new novel.
Jack opens with Jack and his friend Della walking through a graveyard over the course of a night. Jack had rented out his room in his boarding house and plans to sleep in the graveyard. Della hopes a walk through the cemetery will inspire a poem she is working on, and she inadvertently gets locked up in the graveyard after dark.
Jack and Della’s playful banter extends over the first 70 pages of the book. Jack and Della are both preachers’ kids, and they engage in animated theological discussions. Jack grew up Presbyterian, and he believes in predestination. Della is a Methodist, and her family never discussed predestination. “Destiny has made you a Methodist,” Jack replies.
The book cover of Jack.
Both Jack and Della are readers. They quote Milton and argue about interpretations of Hamlet. They both write poetry. They wonder what it would be like to live in a world without rules. Jack and Della are such engaging conversationalists and so tender toward each other that the reader can only hope that their relationship will flower into a romance. “They walked on through the deep grass, shoulder to shoulder in the dark, breathing together. Humans, making their slight, bland sounds, breaths and whispery footsteps, while creatures around them rasped and twittered.” The problem for this couple is that Jack is White, and Della is Black, and they live in St. Louis, Missouri in the 1950s.
Jack narrates events that happened prior to the events of Robinsons’ previous books, so Robinsons’ readers already know that this relationship will end badly for Jack and Della. Della is a school teacher with an impeccable Christian character who brings honor to her family. Jack is a prodigal son who has brought grief to those who are close to him. He drinks too much, works a variety of odd jobs, and engages in petty theft. He has spent time in prison for a crime that he didn’t commit. Jack’s relationship with Della gives him the energy and optimism to reform his life. He dresses better, finds a steady job, and weans himself off of alcohol and cigarettes.
But Jack is racked with guilt because he knows that his relationship with Della will do “grave and final” harm to her. He calls himself the Prince of Darkness, yet his deepest desire is to live a harmless life, especially in relation to Della. His love for her comes at a cost of crippling self-hatred. Jack is a compelling narrator. He makes trouble for all those who love him, yet he is strangely loveable. He is self-aware, a keen observer, an avid reader, and courtly in demeanor.
Several times, Jack resolves to end his relationship with Della. Yet Jack and Della are irresistibly drawn to each other. “Once in a lifetime, maybe, you look at a stranger and you see a soul, a glorious presence out of place in the world,” Della says to Jack. “And if you love God, every choice is made for you. There is no turning away. You have seen the mystery—you’ve seen what life is about. What it is for.”
Jack and Della offer each other friendship, consolation and brutal honesty. They attain the melding of souls that can make romantic love a reflection of God’s love. “The two seemed more and more to ‘mix irradiance,’ like the angels of Paradise Lost.” Yet neither Jack nor Della can save the other from the horrific consequences of living under Jim Crow. Jack and Della’s relationship is fated to become a tale of redemptive love thwarted by a heartless and racist world.
A recurring motif in Robinson’s books is lonely, disconnected people who come together to create a home. Robinson features protagonists who are homeless souls and other protagonists who offer them the warmth and security of home. Gilead, for example, brings together widowed 67 year-old preacher, John Ames, and the itinerant 34 year-old Lila. Together they create a home and have a son.
Jack and Della also have a son, and their tragedy is that, because of America’s original sin, they can never create a home for themselves. “The country had set up this whole crude order to thwart the creation of sons like his. He would see the boy when he saw his mother, by stealth, under cover of night. [Jack] would always be half a stranger to [his son], a puzzle . . . an embarrassment . . . a resentment.”
Although Jack and Della challenge some of the people in their lives to reconsider their views on race, neither Jack nor Della are political activists or social radicals. Jim Crow only confronts them as a barrier to their life together. They do not dream of a redeemed America. Rather, they dream of an Edenic world where there will be no rules and where they can fulfill their love for one another. “The knowledge of the good,” Jack muses, “That half of the primal catastrophe received too little attention . . . Consider the sweet marriage that made [Della] a conspirator with him [and] the loyalty that restored them both, just like grace.”
Jack is not a book for the faint of heart. New York Times book critic Dwight Garner writes that to read Jack is to “enter a remote, airless, life-denying, vaguely pretentious and mostly humorless universe where it is always Sunday morning and never Saturday night.” Garner would prefer to spend his time with a “cheerful, nose-picking whoremaster” like Shakespeare than with a straight-laced Calvinist like Robinson.
Robinson’s unrelenting moral seriousness leaves little room for revelry or comic relief, yet Robinson portrays her characters in a way that ennobles them in a world that habitually robs them of their dignity. This is an expression of Robinson’s Reformed faith, which informs all her books. Robinson is able to see Jack through the eyes of grace because her life is governed by Calvin’s instructions to the faithful in The Golden Booklet of True Christian Life, “The Lord commands us to do good unto all without exception, though the majority are very undeserving when judged according to their own merits. [Scripture] teaches us that we must not think of man’s real value, but only of his creation in the image of God to which we owe all possible honor and love.”
Jack by Marilynne Robinson
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, released Sept. 29, 2020.
Robert Carle is a professor of historical theology and Islam at The King’s College in Manhattan. Dr. Carle has contributed to The Wall Street Journal, The American Interest, Religion Unplugged, Newsday, Society, Human Rights Review, The Public Discourse, Academic Questions, and Reason.