Jack by Marilynne Robinson

Della was speaking to him sometimes in his thoughts, or she was quiet, simply there at the edge of his vision. In her gentle way she was making everything easier. What would she find becoming him? That was what he did. And by putting himself in the way of survival, not to put too fine a point on it, he was doing as she had asked him to do, so forthrightly. Can these bones live? Oh, Lord, you know. But for you, Miss Miles, I am eating this sandwich, for you I am smiling at this stranger, for you I am trying to sleep. He could not imagine an occasion when she might acknowledge any of this. No matter. Their lives were parallel lines that would not meet, he knew that, he would see to that. But they defined each other, somehow. Equidistance was like silence. It had to be carefully sustained to exist at all.

Few books have disappointed me as much as Marilynne Robinson's Home. Coming after the mystical Housekeeping and the elegiac, ruminant Gilead, it felt maudlin and suffocating, even as it covered some of the same ground as Gilead. The problem, I think--or one of them--was that its prodigal son, Jack Boughton, was never quite prodigal enough. The entire novel is constructed around the question of whether Jack can be forgiven and reintegrated into the life of his father's home, but Jack himself never seemed like a problem: he was too weepy, too philosophical, to really push the limits of forgiveness convincingly, despite whatever misdeeds were in his past. When I heard that Robinson was returning to the character of Jack in this new novel, I was both apprehensive and optimistic: it might be another bore, but it might also be a chance to make Jack's travails more convincing.

Jack follows the title character in the events just prior to Home (and Gilead, I think?), a period in which he's bumming around St. Louis. He meets a black schoolteacher named Della, and they fall deeply in love, having principally in common the fact that they both talk like an essay by Marilynne Robinson. But Jack's love for Della is dangerous, even illegal; it means not only gossip and approbation but the possibility of being dismissed from her job at an illustrious school for black students and a break with her family, led by her father, a black separatist bishop from Memphis. Jack, whose history, as we know, includes the "corruption" of a young girl in Iowa with whom he fathered a child, has committed himself to "harmlessness," and his love for Della is anything but harmless.

For me, Jack succeeds where Home largely failed. It provides a convincing portrait of Jack as a someone who thinks very little of himself and a great deal about others, but who seems to bring chaos to their lives even still. At times this quality even takes on a kind of comic aspect, as in a strange moment when he agrees to put on the uniform of a cemetery gardener, only to realize later that the gardener is on the lam and trying to frame him for some obscure misdeed, or when he gets thrown in prison for having stolen property in his pocket--dropped there by a pickpocket panicking at the sight of the cop on the corner. These episodes are droll, but they are intimations of the darker facts of Jack's life, in which is good intentions have all turned sour. Though Jack's love for Della and his love for her are never in question, Jack spends much of the novel pursuing and abandoning her, unable to overcome the quite reasonable belief that his love is a threat or a poison.

I'm actually not surprised that Jack was notably panned in the New York Times this week by Dwight Garner, who finds Robinson's prose "airless." She has a love for abstract nouns that seems to me uniquely Protestant, insofar as Protestantism must construct a faith without the material comfort of the real presence; in Robinson's novels drama works less on the street or in the mind than in the soul, which is the realest thing there is, as Della tells the atheist Jack:

"We all have souls, true?"

He laughed. "Please go on."

"We do. We know this, but just because it's a habit to believe it, not because it is really visible to us most of the time. But once in a lifetime, you look at a stranger and you see a soul, a glorious presence out of place in the world. And if you love God, every choice is made for you. There is no turning away. You've seen the mystery--you've seen what life is about. What it's for. And a soul has no earthly qualities, no history among the things of this world, no guilt or injury or failure. No more than a flame would have. There is nothing to be sad about it except that it is a holy human soul. And it is a miracle when you recognize it."

The other side of this quality is that the novel can seem spectral when you want most for it to be down to earth. It's a novel, after all, about an interracial relationship under Jim Crow, and it's set across more than one black church across the urban heartland of America. Robinson gives the reader numerous black churchmen and churchwomen, tenderly and thoughtfully written, including Della's father, who is gracious to Jack even as he tells him that he will disown Della if she marries him, and yet something of the possible immiseration and violence--the real material stakes of the decision Jack and Della are making--seems just beyond the novel's grasp.

Actually, maybe what the novel is missing most is a sense of anger: why should Della and Jack, two perfectly matched people, not be permitted to be together? I'm reminded of the long digression in Gilead about the Reverend Ames' ancestor who fought for abolition. But that's a different family, and not so much like this pair of dreamers, whose challenge is to accept that the promise of love can outweigh the fear of ruin. Jack's character and situation are unique, but we all must embrace the fact that to love another person grants the power, not always voluntarily wielded, to harm them. Though Jack never quite captures the drama of the soul as powerfully as Gilead or Lila, it is compassionate and a little sweet.