Fifty Books Project 2023

 

Jack by Marilyn Robinson

I do not necessarily disagree with Chris’s statement a few weeks ago that Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels represent the masterpiece of the century so far.  It takes nothing away from Ferrante to suggest that Marilyn Robinson’s Gilead Novels offer stiff competition.  The story two ministers and their families in the fictional town of Gilead, Iowa in the late 1950s, these novels take a hard yet lyrical look at some major questions – right and wrong, love and desire, the nature of faith, the relationship of pride and shame, the balance between individual agency and community obligation.  While the characters are of varying levels of education and experience, they are collectively an amazingly articulate family of heady thinkers.

Jack, published last year, is the fourth in the series (Gilead [2004], Home [2008], and Lila [2014] are the others).  Jack tells the back story of Jack Ames Boughton, son of one of the ministers back in Gilead, namesake of the other.  Readers of the series already know a great deal about Jack:  He is the prodigal son of the Boughton family, having left home years earlier after a youth and young adulthood that brought constant tension and shame to his family.  He has, seemingly from birth, been a petty thief and a liar.  As a young man, he seduced and impregnated a local girl, then abandoned her and their child.  We also know that, after years away from home, he will return to Gilead broke and jobless, separated from the African American woman who is the mother of their son.  The family has had to flee St. Louis to avoid scandal and prison because mixed-race marriage is illegal in both Missouri and Iowa.  We know that Jack waits for some weeks in Gilead, then leaves just days before Della arrives with their child, leaving them again lost and homeless.  In this novel, we see the dawn and maturation of this spiritual marriage, and track its effect on Jack.  

Jack Boughton is no ordinary reprobate.  His stealing is of a kind of compulsion that fuels his internal debate about the nature of sin, crime, agency and predetermination.  This debate within his head gets so complex and heated that taking the opportunity to steal is the only way out.  His drinking is driven by a complex cycle of shame.  He has recently been released from prison and is living in a shady boarding house off money made from odd jobs and left for him at by his brother, who he refuses to see.  Jack refers to himself as the Prince of Darkness and is convinced he brings both moral and practical harm to those around him.  

However, one day while wearing a good suit (purchased with funds his brother gave him so he might attend his mother’s funeral, which he does not) he helps Della Miles retrieve some papers that have blown from her bag as she walks home from her job as a high school English teacher in a rain storm.  He walks her home under the protection of an umbrella he stole earlier in the day and the two feel an immediate and powerful connection and attraction.  This gives Jack the idea that the suit is a kind of false advertising – Della has mistaken him for a minister – and he trades it in for rattier clothing to avoid giving people a false impression of decency.  

Shortly after this, they meet and spend the night in a graveyard.  Jack is there to sleep because he sometimes makes extra money by subletting his room for the night.  Della is there to see the monuments because Jack has praised them during their brief conversation, but has accidentally been locked in for the night.  It is an all-white graveyard and the shame of being caught might cost Della her job.  So might the shame of spending the night there with Jack, but they have a long, remarkable conversation about sin and redemption, spending some time imagining that they are the last two people on earth and can make new rules for behavior, can in effect redefine sin.  The issue of race hangs over every moment of this encounter, but only by implication.  They never clearly state that Jim Crow is the source of danger for Della and the reason their relationship is impossible.  In this world, segregation is as accepted as, and far less remarked upon than the weather

One of the curious aspects of Jack, and of the entire series of novels, is that they present a deeply detailed and nuanced examination of the world these characters live in without any evidence that anyone is really paying critical attention to that world.  Though the novel is set at the dawn of the Civil Rights movement, there is no real hint that such change is possible.  Jack spends a good deal of time reading the papers, but we hear very little about the news they contain – just that a series of urban renewal projects is poised to decimate Black neighborhoods in St. Louis and that there is little anyone can do about it.  This is a world without the concepts of protest, civic action or social change.    

Racial attitudes are entrenched all around.  Della’s family disapproves of her relationship with Jack not because he is a broke ex-con with no job prospects and a serious drinking habit, but because he is white.  In the years that Martin Luther King is making the case for integration, Robinson turns back half a century, presenting a family of morally rigid black separatists who live quite consciously in the tradition of Marcus Garvey.  Jack is thrown out of one very nice rooming house when the landlord finds out he is involved with a Black woman. There is a tense scene involving a segregated bus trip, with no reference to the injustice of the segregation or the ongoing fight against such segregation.  Jack and Della imagine a world without rules, with the rules preventing their relationship being the first to go, make attempts to see each other surreptitiously, and ultimately defy the racial norms, but no one ever discusses any attempt to change those norms.  

It is obvious that this is not because Robinson either approves of these laws or is unaware of civil rights history.  She presents segregation as a part of the world order and then examines that context of injustice in her characters’ moral decision making.  Robinson’s view of morality, her theology if you will, centers on the human connections that give us both the responsibility and the obligation to care for one another.  It is, in these books, inherently individualistic – not in a right-wing, selfish way, but in a kind of Calvinist, personal responsibility vein.

Jack’s thinking around the morality of his relationship to Della centers on his capacity to hurt her.  While he senses immediately – while still holding the umbrella over her head – that she gives him an acceptance and comfort he has never felt before, he also understands (and is repeatedly told) that being with him will cost her dearly.  He accepts the notion that his love for her might best be expressed by leaving her alone.  He also understands that she feels a similar acceptance and comfort around him and that leaving her will cost her perhaps just as dearly.  This then becomes the moral dilemma the novel centers on.  Jack, who sees himself as a permanent, innate source of harm to others and himself, is faced with the opportunity to do someone some good, if he is willing to make a choice.  

All of the advice Jack receives – from Della’s minster father, from a Baptist minister he seeks out for advice and from the hostility of the white world, tells him to leave.  His understanding of the cost to Della is tempered by his own desire to stay, which he interprets as selfishness.  Since his involvement with Della he has found jobs, given up drinking and begun to think of himself as belonging in society.  He sometimes imagines that he will honor the sacrifice they have to make through separation by continuing to live a productive, appropriate life, but the reader suspects he will drift headlong into dissolution. For Robinson, love is not a simple or easy solution to loneliness or shame, but it is the only solution – there is no sense that politics or social change will let us off the hook.  We must love one another or spiritually die.   

Part of the power of this novel is conveyed by the fact that through their various trials and separations, I was fervently hoping that they would find a way to stay together in spite not simply of the social pressures they would face, but of the fact that I have already read Home and know that they are together at least long enough to have a child and lose one another in the social maelstrom that brings on.  It has become clear, however, that Robinson does not simply eschew happy endings.  She calls into question the concept of endings themselves:  in this series, which opens up continually to new facets of the questions John Ames was asking when we started, to new, deeper looks at characters whose plots have already closed in other volumes.  As a reader, I am capable of revisiting certain questions and ideas many times – Robinson seems to have known this before I did.

Ferrante’s great achievement is to examine the formation of a self over the course of a single character’s lifetime and a single friendship.  Her character, Lena, wants to be her truest, best self alone and struggles throughout her life with the fact that she can only rise to the demands of that self through her friendship with Lila.  Society seems to exist to limit her and her need for Lila is as often a source of frustration as liberation.  Robinson’s world view has similarities in that the world is inherently limiting and destructive.  But there is little sense that anyone might ever hope to stand up to it alone.  Jack certainly can’t, and we see that Della’s proud position of status is, in her own eyes, empty and stultifying.  These two can offer each other a way to be themselves that is not available to them as individuals, if they can muster the courage to take it. In the series,  Robinson examines the social formation of the self, the soul, through many different characters, each trying to assert some individual sense of self and finding that impossible outside of the web of relationships that reveals them.