Jack
by Marilynne Robinson

Reviewed by Margaret Kolb

In 2019, Marilynne Robinson was one of the greatest novelists alive. Since 2020 struck, she has seemed more savior than novelist, the questions her narratives pose not just important, but as necessary as the news, as vital as breathing. When Jack, her latest novel, appeared in the fall of 2020, it served as an immediate and prescient rejoinder to our brave new world of loneliness and historical nihilism.

Set just after World War II, Jack asks questions that are both newly pressing and age-old—about knowledge, suffering, regret, and joy—with minute attention to the religious, political, and racial contexts that frame those questions. As in Robinson’s previous novels, this framing is slow, sober, and simple. In striking contrast to our screen-addled moment, insights along the way prove downright ferile, overtaking characters offline and without warning, “like an armed man in the night,” both the product of their doings and altogether beyond them. By a lake in a cemetery in the middle of the night, where —Jack Boughton tells Della Miles—you can “hear your own footsteps, as if they mattered”—Jack and Della think about Hamlet, reinvent the moral universe, and fall in love.

Readers of the Gilead series (comprised by Gilead, Home, Lila, and now Jack) already know: at her best, Robinson’s prose astonishes. Each sentence sends readers backwards and forwards, swirling a phrase in the mind as if it were port on the tongue—guarding the flavors, unwilling to let them go. “This is an interesting planet,” John Ames writes in Gilead, the novel-length letter he writes his young son in anticipation of his own death. “It deserves all the attention you can give it.” The same might be said of Robinson’s writing, where starkly unadorned sentences contrast the depths of thought and feeling that they conjure. (“I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I’m old, and you said, I don’t think you’re old,” Gilead opens.)

The series is rooted in the lives of John Ames and Robert Boughton, two men who grew up, became ministers, and grew old in a small Iowa town named Gilead. The post-war moment finds them debating Eisenhower’s suitability for office and God’s nature in the same breath. Focalized variously through John Ames, his wife Lila, Boughton’s daughter Glory, and (with this latest installment) Boughton’s son Jack, the novels are in part meditations on history. The Underground Railroad and the Civil War; the 1918 flu, the Dust Bowl, and the polio epidemic: each persists into Gilead’s mid-century present. But Robinson doesn’t truck in set pieces, instead refracting these historical ripples through the vaguest of memories and the strangest of details. History is what hides, as much as it hurts, giving a logic to the petty thefts of Ames’s abolitionist grandfather, and eroding Gilead’s founding abolitionist fervor, to expose its muddled political detachment, where the most recent historical wounds cannot be faced, or even acknowledged. “He was a child, and they murdered him,” Jack tells his father of Emmett Till’s death. “Yes, that is upsetting. I had another memory of it,” Robert Boughton remarks. Jack’s reply—“We read different newspapers”—muffles his anguish, and testifies to our own. For many proponents of the historical novel, this kind of prophesy is why the genre matters in the first place: by bringing the past to light, the historical novel reopens the wounds of the present.

But to say that the Gilead novels are powerful exemplars of a sub-genre understates Robinson’s achievement, which represents an intervention on not only the historical novel, but also on such major tropes as the marriage plot, the orphan plot, and the epistolary novel. The series’ four distinct perspectives alone are worth all the attention we can give them. Their sustained intersections recall the intricate plotting associated most readily with detective fiction, where the smallest incident—a note written, an old magazine exchanged—holds a clue to the universe. Ames toils over a sermon; Jack attends unexpectedly and recognizes himself in it. He smiles in embarrassment, and Ames misinterprets his smile. This encounter plays out across the novels, gaining amplitude with each representation, until the slightest gesture carries with it the shock of recognition and the anguish of error. A sparrow could not fall to the ground in Gilead without Robinson knowing, and without each character tragically misinterpreting its fall.

Robinson’s greatest formal achievement, the perfect union between parable and novel, is also the least likely be repeated beyond her work. The novel form took off in the British eighteenth century, by most accounts riding the tide of rising secularism. From the start, it was a form in which the novelist was the only God worth considering. Critics, in turn, appropriated the tools of Biblical study, or exegesis, to find a language for describing novels. In other words, when we analyze a novel today, we bring age-old theological practices to bear on a profoundly secular art form. Jack binds the two sundered traditions with startling harmony. One can easily discuss, say, Oliver Twist, Pride and Prejudice, or even Robinson Crusoe without mentioning grace, forgiveness, or original sin. I struggle to imagine any reading of Jack, by contrast, that does not hold these theological puzzles paramount.

Anyone marveling at Robinson’s reformation of the novel might be forgiven for neglecting the novels’ plots. In fact, John Ames Boughton, self-christened “Jack,” and the eponymous hero of this fall’s installment, might just be the plot. The previous three novels chronicle Jack’s homecoming after an absence of fifteen years, a return that shoots through each character’s life, gathering its mundanity into a shape. For everyone but Jack, that shape is governed by Jack’s childhood and adolescence. An impossibly lonely child, his crimes and petty thefts linger. John Ames’s picture of his late wife as a child, gone; his Greek testament and reading glasses, also gone. Much later, Della’s prized books go the same way. For Jack, these thefts are attempts at “weaving himself into the emotional fabric of another life.” From the outside, they look more like “pure malice.” Supposedly forgiven, they are too pointed to forget, particularly in light of Jack’s eventual, gravest sin. As a college student, Jack impregnated a younger child near Gilead. He went back to school, and his family’s attempts to help the young mother and baby were refused more often than accepted. Eventually, the baby died.

No one has gotten over this tragedy, including Jack. Jack is nothing if not loved, and yet it’s unclear how much this love matters in the climate of unrelenting scrutiny his very presence produces. His fragility derives in part from this scrutiny, which in turn complicates his unspoken reason for return: his search for a home for his wife Della, and their son Robert, who are Black. Jack’s search renders the novels’ plots an American retelling of the prodigal son parable, crystallizing the ramifications of apparently trivial, unconsidered racism into forces which could end a marriage, inspire a suicide, and orphan a child.

Jack’s inscrutable suffering is the black hole at the heart of the previous novels, a force that amasses energy with each attempt to understand and forgive him. Jack’s publication therefore seemed to promise the impossible: an explanation of the gravitational force that pulled the threads of the previous novels into taut relief. It is striking, then, that Robinson does not choose to retell Jack’s homecoming—or even much of his childhood—from his perspective; instead, Jack chronicles the love story that will eventually send him home, producing the Gilead novels. Even in love, Jack’s mind is “its own place,” and a difficult one at that. Despite our new vantage point, Jack’s extraordinary fragility remains a mystery, balanced by the mystery of love, which strikes and holds with a tenacity as inexplicable as the stupidity of his petty thefts. Why does Della, a high school English teacher, fall in love with Jack, a self-proclaimed bum who steals her books? Why, for that matter, does Lila love silvery old John Ames, twice her age, or Ames quiver with anticipation to see Lila, a woman whose most recent home was a brothel?

These questions are familiar in part because they are readerly questions. We read, in part, to understand. So it is both strange and fitting that Jack the novel does not begin to explain Jack. Flashbacks to Jack’s childhood recall his isolation at the heart of a happy, bustling family, without offering any causes for it. Throughout the series, characters have asked themselves and each other relentlessly for the “why” of Jack; any possible dissatisfaction with this installment will force readers to realize that they, like Jack’s father, have always wanted to know why, too. But the Gilead series, a novels-long American retelling of the prodigal son parable, refuses to depart from parable form. The central mysteries of Jack matter precisely because they go unresolved. Who is he really? What is he thinking? How sorry should he be? And what will happen next?

That, at least, we already know. Home, Robinson’s second installment in the series, ends when Della and their son Robert come to Gilead. They leave town, having missed Jack, but they see his house, his favorite tree, and his town. As Jack’s sister Glory watches them go, she envisions Robert’s eventual return, and with it, generational, rather than personal redemption. It would seem that Robinson’s plot is unfolding more slowly than we might think. Her most recent intervention is to turn the marriage plot inside out, wherein marriage is the beginning of all turmoil, rather than its conclusion. Jack is the eye of the hurricane, a beam of hope through the turbulence that has surrounded Jack since childhood.

“The world was all before them,” Robinson writes of Della and Jack, “such as it was.” The world is always all before these characters, who are already fallen, and certain to fall (or get knocked down) again. It is a statement that is trivially true, just as trivially true as the existence of love, evil, loneliness, and family, nouns that are both our daily bread and our daily mystery. Robinson’s feat as a novelist is to render them poignantly real, newly important, and to embed in them a moral imperative for the present. The world is all before us, already fallen, and still within our reach. The questions Robinson asks about race, history, knowledge, and redemption have always been with us, embedded in American history and alive in our American present. Robinson is too wise to write the answers. It’s possible that they can’t be written at all. Perhaps they can only be lived.