Jack by Marilynne Robinson

Can these bones live?

I read Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead when it came out in 2004. A few years later I read it again with a church book club, and four years again I read it a third time for a book club.

It is a gorgeous,profound novel written as a letter by an elderly preacher to his young son. The narrator, John Ames, is conflicted about his best friend's ne'er-do-well son, Jack. Jack has returned to Gilead to visit his ailing father. His presence is a torment to John Ames who fears his young wife will be drawn to Jack. Jack left town after impregnating a girl, his abandonment of the child causing a rift. When Jack finally tells John Ames he has a colored wife and child, he gives Jack the blessing of forgiveness he has long sought.

Robinson has revisited Gilead in Home and Lila, and now in a fourth volume, Jack. I could not resist reading Jack's story.

The novel begins shortly after Jack is released from prison. He has been a bum, a drunk, homeless. There is still an air about him of respectability, learned from being the son of a Presbyterian minister. People call him Professor. They appreciate his playing hymns on the piano.

Jack is in a black suit when he assists a young colored teacher who has dropped her papers in the rain, and she believes him to be a minister and invites him into her home. From this a relationship begins, one that is not only socially unacceptable but against the law.

Jack is profoundly aware of his sinfulness. His birth nearly killed his mother. His boyish antics, unrelenting unbelief, and teenage wildness embarrassed his preacher father. The final straw was impregnating a young woman and not taking responsibility for their child who later dies. His legacy of harming those around him weighs heavily.

"And everything is vulnerable to harm, one way or another Everybody is vulnerable. It's kind of horrible when you think about it. All that breakage, without so much as an intention behind it half the time. All that tantalizing fragility."~from Jack by Marilynne Robinson

This young woman who treats him so respectfully draws him. He has lied to her by not correcting her mistake; already his harm has begun. But Jack can't forget her.

He had seen kindness weary before.
~from Jack by Marilynne Robinson

Jack and Della meet again and talk poetry and more. He is falling in love. The daughter of a minister, Della is a college educated teacher, and has a respectable family who loves her. They can have no future in this world.

...it was taking her a long time to give up on him.
~from Jack by Marilynne Robinson

Jack feels shame and dread and grief. Just by existing he is destroying Della's career and alienating her from her family. Her freedom and even her life is in peril if they are caught.  Jack calls himself the Prince of Darkness. His "battered, atheist soul" has regrets, but he cannot repent. He jokes that he has lived a life of 'prevenient death,' a play on prevenient grace which believes all can grasp the grace already offered.

Jack isn't preying on Della. She has pursued him. Like God, she can look beyond the outer appearance and the social appraisement to the inner man. She sees his soul.

But once in a lifetime, maybe, you look at a stranger and you see a soul, a glorious presence out of place in the world...You've seen the muster--you've seen what life is all about. What it's for.
~from Jack by Marilynne Robinson

Jack has stolen the grandest thing by far--he has stolen Della. Yet a wise man has told him that if God puts some happiness in your way, you should take it. Even the greatest sinner can find a moment of grace.

Jack is one of the great characters in literature, a portrait of a sinner who struggles with his unbelief and the wreckage he has brought. His love story goes to the heart of America's original sin, slavery and segregation that treated people of color as less than human.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Jack: A Novel
by Marilynne Robinson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Pub Date September 29, 2020
ISBN: 9780374279301
hardcover $27.00 (USD)

from the publisher

Marilynne Robinson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, returns to the world of Gilead with Jack, the latest novel in one of the great works of contemporary American fiction

Marilynne Robinson’s mythical world of Gilead, Iowa—the setting of her novels Gilead, Home, and Lila, and now Jack—and its beloved characters have illuminated and interrogated the complexities of American history, the power of our emotions, and the wonders of a sacred world.

Jack is Robinson’s fourth novel in this now-classic series. In it, Robinson tells the story of John Ames Boughton, the prodigal son of Gilead’s Presbyterian minister, and his romance with Della Miles, a high school teacher who is also the child of a preacher. Their deeply felt, tormented, star-crossed interracial romance resonates with all the paradoxes of American life, then and now.

Robinson’s Gilead novels, which have won one Pulitzer Prize and two National Book Critics Circle Awards, are a vital contribution to contemporary American literature and a revelation of our national character and humanity.