I’m a gifted thief. I lie fluently, often for no reason. I’m a bad but confirmed drunk. I have no talent for friendship. What talents I do have I make no use of. I am aware instantly and almost obsessively of anything fragile, with the thought that I must and will break it. This has been true of me my whole life. I isolate myself as a way of limiting the harm I can do. And here I am with a wife! Of whom I know more good than you have any hint of, to whom I could do a thousand kinds of harm, never meaning to, or meaning to.
I first encountered the titular character of Jack in Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Gilead: In that earlier work, John “Jack” Ames Boughton returns to the town of Gilead as the prodigal son of its upstanding and long-suffering Presbyterian Minister; eventually revealing that he had been joined in a challenging (and illegal) marriage with a Black woman. In Jack, Robinson goes back to the beginning of Jack and Della’s relationship (which started shortly after WWII), and superficially, everything about this story sparked with me; heart and mind. Marilynne Robinson is a deep thinker and masterful writer; no words are wasted in her use of this fictional storyline to explore complex theological concepts. But while I completely engaged with Jack’s struggles, and often read with my heart in my throat as he made bad decision after bad decision, I couldn’t shake being slightly offended on behalf of dear Della — she seems to be a too-good-to-be-true archetype (instead of an actual human being), meant to test Jack’s commitments to atheism and nihilism, and the fact that she is Black (and considered a traitor to her race by her family) seems an unnecessary complication that doesn’t do justice to her as a person. Ultimately, Jack is a complex and fully human character (who fulfills a protagonist’s requirements of challenge and change) and I couldn’t help but connect with him. On the other hand, Della is a catalyzing agent for Jack and little more, and as the main character of colour in this book, I think that Robinson misstepped by not making her more knowable or believable. Otherwise, a stunning addition to the Gilead series. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in the final forms.)
Dear Jesus, what was he doing? This was not what he had promised himself. This was not harmlessness. He was sure he had no right to involve her in so much potential misery. How often had he thought this? But she had the right to involve herself, or had claimed the right, holding his hand the way she had. She was young, the daughter of a protective family. She might have no idea yet that embarrassment, relentless, punitive scorn, can wear away at a soul until it recedes into wordless loneliness. God in the silence. In the deep darkness. The highest privilege, his father said. He was usually speaking of death, of course. The congregant’s soul had entered the Holy of Holies. Jack sometimes called this life he had lived prevenient death. He had learned that for all its comforts and discomforts, its stark silence first of all, there was clearly no reprieve from doing harm.
It’s easy to see what any man would find attractive about Miss Della Miles: young and lovely, poised and thoughtful, this daughter of a Memphis-based Methodist Bishop received a college education and fulfilled her dream of moving to St. Louis in order to teach English at Sumner High (the first high school for African-American students west of the Mississippi River). As for Jack Boughton: he’s an ex-con, a drunk, and by his own description, an old, white bum whose only stated goal in life is an aspiration to harmlessness (rarely achieved). So, despite being raised “to develop self-sufficiency in the Negro race by the practice of separatism”, and despite anti-miscegenation laws that could see Della jailed for their relationship, a bit of shared poetry and exaggerated gallantry are somehow enough for this young woman to risk losing her family, job, and freedom in order to be with the strange white man who has taken to roaming her neighbourhood at night, causing a stir in the community that reaches her family back in Memphis. As an actual human woman living with these stakes, I don’t see why Della would look twice at the scarecrow with the frayed cuffs and the whisky breath, but to Marilynne Robinson’s purpose, Della is more a symbol of God’s grace towards the fallen Jack than an actual person (and again, I feel slightly offended on Della’s behalf, only partly related to race).
According to the most relevant definition I could find, grace is "the love and mercy given to us by God because God desires us to have it, not necessarily because of anything we have done to earn it”; and boy, does Jack work hard at rejecting love and mercy. As in the other books that I’ve read in this series, this volume has several scenes with ministers (and the children of ministers) discussing Christian doctrine, all while the doctrine-in-action plays out in the background (and in case I’m making this sound like it belongs in the Christian Fiction section of a bookstore, these discussions are more philosophical than missionary). I was struck by Jack’s use of the word “prevenient” in that last passage (a word I had never heard before) and discovered that it is often used by Calvinists — as in “prevenient grace” — to explain free will (or, if one prefers, “free won’t”), and that knowledge furthered my understanding of what Robinson was trying to achieve here. (And as I am nothing like a Calvinist, it's all fascinating to the parts of my brain that are interested in anthropology and culture; people don't need to live on the other side of the world from me for me to be interested in how they live and what they believe.)
He let her look, not even lowering his eyes. He was waiting to see what she would make of him. And then he would be what she made of him.
Taken as a straight story, the plot-points of Jack’s life and actions are compelling and affecting; this is a well-written tale that completely captures postwar America and its ongoing struggles with racial and social equality. But of course Marilynne Robinson’s focus here isn’t solely on the historical details of her plot: over the course of the Gilead series, she has been exploring and demonstrating the tenets of Christian faith, and this elevated intention does serve to elevate the whole project — you know you’re reading something with heft and purpose. I was made to care for Jack and I was rooting for him to find salvation (in the secular sense); I just wish that Della felt more like Jack’s partner than God’s instrument.
