Jack (Marilynne Robinson)

Jack is a love story. It is about John Boughton, a hopeless ne'er-do-well and preacher's son, and his relationship with Della Miles, a teacher and bishop's daughter. Set in post-WWII St. Louis, their interracial romance is illegal; Jack must navigate this tense situation while he deals with his own self-loathing and checkered past.

Jack is hopeless. "No one had done him any real harm, except himself." He clings to Robert Frost's verse as a life summary:

I have been one acquainted with the night.

I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.

After a stint in prison (ironically for a crime he did not commit), he lives in a sort of self-imposed exile, living off his brothers' generosity and spending time doing odd jobs, being a bum, engaging in petty theft, or alcoholism. He believes that "he had nothing to give anyone, that his life was an intricate tangle of futility . . ." and takes to keeping away from people, figuring that "keeping his distance was a favor, a courtesy, to all those strangers who might, probably would, emerge somehow poorer for proximity to him." Intensely lonely, he wonders "How do people live?" Then came Miss Della Miles.

Della has bright prospects, fraught though they be with the realities of being a colored woman in that era. She has been to college, has strong family support, and has her life ahead of her. Through a series of odd events, Jack and Della meet and, shockingly, enjoy each other's company. They fall in love. Jack realizes "that there is nothing more I want from life. If I could imagine an eternity of sitting here with you talking nonsense, there'd be nothing more I would want . . . " But their relationship is star-crossed from the start as Jack wrestles with his past and how/why good should come to him, and what it means to love and be loved.

Jack tries to push Della away. He warns her: "I'm ridiculous. It never changes. Every day is a new proof." "I'm ruining things. I do that. I try to keep to myself, and it happens, anyway." He wrestles with her love and grace: "Flourishing seemed wrong in a man so disheartened as he was." He confesses to a pastor: "forgiveness scares me. It seems like a kind of antidote to regret, and there are things I haven't regretted sufficiently." He is confronted with the reality that "Shame was a very old habit with him. He had long considered it pentitential, payment extracted in the form of steady, tolerable misery, against a debt he would never settle."

As Jack wrestles, Della sticks by his side. His pastor reminds him that the good things he does are just as much a part of him as his failures. And that there is grace for the latter: "If the Lord thinks you need punishing, you can trust Him to see to it. He knows where to find you. If He's showing you a little grace in the meantime, He probably won't mind if you enjoy it." In this world where guilt and grace meet, what should be his focus?

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Set in the same world as her other novels (Gilead, Home, and Lila), it was a delight to find out more about the wayward son that was mentioned in them. As with the others, here Robinson writes powerfully and poetically on themes of brokenness and grace. She does that well. That said, I wish a few things were different:

- one scene dragged on interminably

- it was sometimes hard to follow the chronology of events; I couldn't tell the flashbacks from the current storyline in places. I couldn't tell if that was deliberate (an echo of Jack's internal confusion) or unintentional

- the racial theme wasn't covered nearly as much as Jack's internal wrestlings, making it seem mildly imbalanced

- you never see Jack and Della come home to Gilead; I had hoped for that (which was covered in Home) to be examined from his perspective

Overall, though, this remains an excellent and worthy read. I was engrossed and enchanted.

Rating: A-