Marilynne Robinson finds transcendence in the stunning, soul-searching Jack
Aux Features Book Review
Marilynne Robinson’s books are open questions to the reader, each thoughtful, considered moment in the lives of her characters quietly inviting you to consider your own present moment in the world; not to compare circumstances, but to acknowledge that circumstances are always more than they seem. That your life, at this very moment, has meaning. It’s not always easy to appreciate that fact, and it’s not always an inviting task.
But it’s certainly rewarding. Jack, the latest novel from Robinson, has ample pleasures, rarely separable from the potent spiritual and existential concepts and stirring emotions conjured by her narrative. It’s probably not necessary to dwell too much on the plot: John Ames Boughton, the black sheep of his family, has carved out an aimless and dispiriting life, his long history of selfishness and destructive behavior having sent him to a near-penniless existence in St. Louis. After two years in jail, he ekes out a survival from a sad room in a flophouse, alternating between unemployment and short-term gigs, often drunk and prone to assaults from local gambling-debt collectors. This all begins to change once he meets Della, a schoolteacher with whom he finds a simple but fiercely loyal romance. Unfortunately, this is long before Loving V. Virginia—John is white, Della is Black, and any interracial relationship isn’t just a legal dead end, but a threat to their very lives from the disapproving world that surrounds them. It all sounds like a Hallmark weepie, but in Robinson’s hands, it becomes transcendent.
Although this is the fourth of the author’s Gilead novels, the reader needn’t know anything about the previous books to become ensnared in its meditative reflection on guilt, love, and forgiveness. True, if you’ve read Gilead, Robinson’s 2005 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction, you know this story doesn’t have a happy ending: In that book, Boughton is a tertiary character who returns home to the titular Iowa town to live with his minister father, though it’s not until the denouement that one learns that Boughton is suffering the forced separation from his common-law wife and son, thanks to segregation laws and her family’s rejection of him. That’s the tragic future that awaits, roughly eight years after the events of this new novel.
Here, though, the tragedy doesn’t stem from the outside world, but John’s internal struggle to transcend his past. Having recognized his drive toward destruction, he’s decided to live a life of isolation to avoid hurting anyone other than himself. Because he’s made bad choices so consistently in the past, disappointing everyone from his devout father to his siblings to his prior targets of romance, John is convinced he’s a certain way—a “textbook case of human degeneracy,” as he jokingly refers to himself with total seriousness. Jack is about the struggle to live with guilt, and the ways in which we can still find grace, or even a measure of redemption, in caring for others more than ourselves. Yet it’s no simple case of being redeemed by love, or any such facile summation. How does one know what caring for others means—should it involve also caring about oneself? Does it allow for finding joy in things that also cause pain? Life is messy, in other words, but as one of the few kind advisors in Jack’s life offers, “You take care. That’s the first thing.”
Gilead was an epistolary novel about a genuinely good man trying to understand what it means to live a life of faith and joy. Subsequent books Home and Lila lacked the same seismic emotional and spiritual force, shifting as they did to the third person (and more elusive and uncertain protagonists). Jack achieves something of a singular beauty by giving itself over to a man arguably most unlike Gilead’s John Ames, Boughton’s namesake. It’s not hard to see why Robinson is attracted to the character: If the Jack of Home was in the throes of a spiritual crisis, a victim of heartbreak who was also the long-running emotional tormentor of his family, here he’s just beginning to realize that a life of easy choices and avoidance of harm may have the opposite effect. We’re so often taught to simply believe in ourselves—to trust our instincts—that to see a narrative in which second-guessing oneself and refusing one’s deepest impulses is a potential wellspring of charity and good is, in itself, noteworthy. That Robinson can make it ring so true is what makes it great.
At the heart of it all is Robinson’s lovely, simple writing, both lyrical and spare at the same time. The smallest of acts receive revelatory descriptions, as when a character removes his glasses: “When he took them off, the skin around his eyes looked tender, like a private self.” Or her piercing assessment of a shambolic used bookstore, as a “musty little cave walled with failed efforts of every literary kind, growing drabber together as the years passed.” The most evocative moments are saved for Jack’s private ruminations, of the ways the human psyche can suffer, whether through trauma or years of pedestrian attrition: “Shame was a very old habit with him. He had long considered it penitential, payment extracted in the form of steady, tolerable misery, against a debt he would never settle. He was even a little loyal to it, as if it assured him there was justice in the universe.” Jack is full of these insights, thoughtful turns of phrase from a character whose perpetual struggle between wastrel and righteous is all too familiar a bailiwick for the universal insecurities of the human condition. It’s a powerfully moving book, and a reminder that no visit to Robinson’s Gilead—even when it never sets foot in that town—is a wasted visit.
Author photo: Alec Soth/Magnum Photos
10 Comments
I liked the part where Robin Williams told us life is fleeting at his valedictorian speech.
Is there an author with a track record as good as Robinson’s?
Gilead is a marvel, Lila is a strange story that somehow fits into the first perfectly and the rare sequel/prequel that makes the previous love story better, and Home adds depth to it all.
Houskeeping, her first book a marvel.
Needless to say I’m very excited for this.
I think it’s interesting though that Gilead doesn’t end quite the way you said. Jack comes home, to the town founded by Abolitionists, hoping that he and Della and his son could live there together. Only to learn, from Ames, that the town long ago lost its soul and has descended into the same old American racism, and Ames, despite his “goodness,” has no comfort to offer.
Thank you! I did like the book a lot, but I tend to find it a lot less uplifting than many others who praise it. At the surface it seems to be about this, yes, genuinely decent guy, looking back at his modest life, characterized by duty and care for others and wringing the last drops of joy and beauty out of his waning days. It seems to be about preserving the capacity for wonder and awe well into old age and finding the transcendent in the ordinary, etc.
But then there’s repeated mention of that black church that burnt down for some reason, one never found out, what a weird coincidence. And the disappointed abolutionist grandfather who left full of reproach, who was willing to fight (and, argueably, kill) for what’s right and now sees the just cause abandoned by the next generation. Our protagonist is a pacifist, he’s horrified by his grandfather’s capacity for violence and that’s a big theme – yes, he admires his grandfather’s committment to justice, and his willingness to sacrifice everything for the things he believes in (also the comfort and security of his own family), but saints and martyrs are hard to live with. So our protagonist doesn’t follow in his grandfather’s footsteps, he chooses a more quiet way of “being a genuinely decent guy”. And the question is, was it enough, and I do think the book wants us to keep wondering.
Sure, it seems to end on this moment of grace – John Ames finally having that heart-to-heart with Jack, the prodigal (god)son returning, he viewed with suspicion thorought the book, but now can genuinely forgive and bless. But honestly, I wasn’t quite as impressed with that, maybe it’s just relief that Jack isn’t after his soon-to-be-widow after all, being in love with someone else. And that final conversation is genuinely gutting. John Ames can’t even tell Jack how likely it is that Jack’s father, John’s best friend, would accept a black daughter-in-law. Somehow the topic never came up! Just like he never bothered to find out how the black church actually burned down. I mean there’s “not-being-a-fighter”, and then there’s being wilfully obtuse.
At some point John mentions that everything his flock knows about God, they know from him, and in all these sermons he never found an opportunity to drive home the point that black lifes matter? These are the children of people who were willing to risk their own lifes hiding escaped slaves; it shouldn’t seem like such an uphill battle to make them accept a black-daughter-in law. And maybe John thought it should all go without saying, but then he never wonders why all the black people moved away? And when his parish is finally put to the test, he just throws up his hand and sends Jack away without hope. He gives up before the battle even begins.
This is a book about judgment – John struggling not to judge Jack, and finally being able to meet him where he is. But is it really a book against judgment? Was grandfather wrong about being so judgmental?
It’s also a book about legacy – John’s anxiety about not leaving much of a financial legacy to his young wife and child, haven gotten them so late in life and therefore failed to provide for their future, his desire to pass on a sort of spiritual legacy at least. And it seems important to him to honour his own grandfather’s legacy as well – he and his father almost starve on their trip to find and honour his grave – but it has to be said, he ulimately completely fails in that regard. So the question the book left me with is really, does John deserve the serenity of these final pages?
Yeah. As someone said, Ames says, “If I live, I’ll vote for Eisenhower.” And why is that? Because he’s a republican. Why is that? He’s forgotten, but it’s because his grandfather was an abolitionist. They’ve all forgotten what they were. And Ames has serenity. But he failed. A man came to him and said, “I need help and my sin is too heavy for me to carry,” and he answers with nothing. He sends him away. Ames isn’t the forgiving father in the parable. He’s the merciless older brother.
I can’t wait to make my way slowly through this, to think about it after. I have nothing but confidence in Robinson’s ability to give us a thoughtful, challenging, beautiful piece of literature. Your review only makes me more eager for this to arrive on my doorstep.
Thanks for the review — I’ll certainly add the book to my ever expanding reading list. It has a fair chance to not stay there too long, though. In fact, I’m currently reading Gilead, taking a lot of time doing so, because it’s just so wonderful and dense.Which, btw, you’d never know from the German translation. Short rant: On one of the very first pages you can find “the good life” translated as “ein prima Leben”, which is just totally tone-deaf. (“Prima” is more in the line of “neat” or “dandy”, or “swell”, which is obviously not what the narrator is going for.) In fact, I wonder if the translation is in parts to blame for the fact that Robinson is really not well-known in the German-speaking world. (Gilead was only translated in 2016.) Which is a pity, because having a thoughtful and empathetic reflection on faith in a US-American setting is all the more welcome in a time when it’s only the loudest and most bewildering expressions of “religion in the US” that we get to see in our media.
Thanks for this wonderful review. As a fan of Robinson’s over work, I look forward to reading this one too.You stated: We’re so often taught to simply believe in ourselves—to trust our instincts—that to see a narrative in which second-guessing oneself and refusing one’s deepest impulses is a potential wellspring of charity and good is, in itself, noteworthy. That Robinson can make it ring so true is what makes it great.
I wonder if the reason Robinson can say “refusing one’s deepest impulses” is a good is because she believes it, as a Christian, and particularly, a fan of John Calvin. If you believe your deepest impulses and motivations, though originally divine, are corrupted by sin and in need of redeeming, it’s a virtue to deny yourself and seek to be changed in heart and mind by a perfect love.
such a good information provide us. It’s hard tofind good quality writing like yours these days.I seriously appreciate people like you!https://everydaysgadgets.com
hello friend,boost up your site manually,I will create 50 board with 500 pins as a Pinterest marketing experthttps://www.fiverr.com/share/ErqB6K