Jack (Oprah's Book Club)Audio CD

This is the fourth of a series of novels by Marilynne Robinson. (Gilead, Home, Lila). Each book examines the same events and relationships among two families of Calvinist ministers, Congregationalist and Presbyterian, from a different perspective. Robinson explores themes of faith, grace, healing, and forgiveness through the lives and meditations of these characters. One can also read the stories through the lens of different theologies. Jack is more than a character. He is the embodiment of an idea.

Jack is John Ames Boughton, namesake of the narrator of Gilead, and son of the main character of Home. Jack personifies the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. He is the dearly loved but exasperating “bad seed” of the Boughton family who seems unable to extricate himself from an itchy discomfort with his family and himself, resulting in alcoholism. He fumbles into a series of awkward predicaments and bad choices that he has clear moral knowledge of, but seems unable to avoid. His Calvinist father and godfather can neither save him nor give up hope for him.

Significantly, Della Miles is the child of an AME minister. Methodists have a commitment to doing practical good, a more hopeful theology of salvation, which may explain both Jack’s attraction to a black church that feeds him both physically and spiritually, and Della’s attraction to him. As Lila says to him, in Home, when Ames and Boughton are discussing predestination, “A person can change. Otherwise, what’s the use?”

Lila is perhaps the other side of the coin: a person seemingly condemned by her circumstances to an ugly, graceless life of sin and struggle, who nevertheless finds and accepts redemption in the love her husband brings to her. She changes and grows. Even facing an uncertain future, we sense her increasing faith and strength.

But it is not clear that Jack can change, only that his family (and his readers) yearn to see that happen.

With this novel, Marilynne Robinson brings to a close the story begun in her previous book “Gilead,” and continued in the subsequent volumes “Home” and “Lila.” The four books act together to tell a single story focused on the Boughton and Ames families who are in and from the fictional town of Gilead, Iowa.

It is possible to read “Jack” as a stand-alone novel, but you shouldn’t. Rather read it in the order it was written, last of the four. The scope of Robinson’s achievement cannot be fully appreciated until all four have been read. She has created a series of old testament books, written in a modern context. Somewhat, modern, that is, as the books all take place post World War 2, in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. Start with Gilead. The next three books are a biblical like retelling of the same story, involving the same people, each from a different perspective, each arising out of a different context, expanding the story bit by bit until it stands fully revealed for all to see - all the good and bad.

All of the books take place in the Midwest, with “Jack” being centered in St. Louis. It focuses on the Boughton’s wayward son, Jack, and his love for an upstanding young black woman, Della Miles. Suffice it to say, miscegenation was illegal in Missouri at the time of the book, a critical element of the story.

Both Jack and Della’s fathers are men of the cloth. Among other things, this means their children are each highly educated. Jack and Della not only know their bible, but also have a love of literature, especially poetry. But other than that, they seem to have little in common. Jack has become a reprobate (a “bum” as he calls himself). From “Gilead” on we have learned that Jack is irredeemable and Robinson draws this out in this book. Every good thing about Jack is revealed to have some taint of fraud or touch of avarice. At the same time Della is so completely upstanding as to be almost a caricature of a pastor’s daughter. It is this improbable pairing that seems to bother people most who read “Jack”. What can Della possibly see in Jack? In fact, within the context of the larger story, they are simply different reflections of the same fundamental person.

These are two people who don’t fit. They are somehow out of step with the time in which they are living and they are each powerless to do anything about it. Della strives to conform to her family’s wishes. Jack lashes out against his father with petty acts of theft and meanness. Put them in today’s culture, when Jack could be comfortable rejecting his father’s religion and finding his morality in a non-spiritual context, and Della, being able to succeed in a world that accepts blacks as equals, and both able to live with the other without condemnation by their respective races, and you could see a happy ending. But that is not the world in which they live. Because of whom they are we know from the first book, “Gilead,” they are predestined to a fate they cannot alter and each is deeply angry because of it. A similar family background and a mutual fundamental kindness is what initiated their attraction. But their bond is cemented by the mutual anger at the intractable future forced on them. Their individual day-to-day appearance to the outside world belies this fundamental similarity, even as, ultimately, it proves the impossibility of avoiding their fates.

If you read “Jack” alone, this may all seem like the prelude to a dreary story of predestination. But within the context of the four books as a whole, I don’t think this is true. In the earlier books Reverend Boughton’s friend, Reverend Ames, has a young wife, Lila. Reverend Ames married Lila very late in life, shocking his congregation, as not only was Lila young, but she was also, clearly, of a very poor and questionable background. At the very minimum, she was uneducated, and did not seem to be a suitable woman for Reverend Ames to marry. Lila was aware of all of this, and spoke rarely around others, hoping to make her lack of formal education less apparent. At this point in the story, Jack has returned home from St. Louis. One evening they were all sitting on the porch and Jack began a conversation about free will. He didn’t understand, if God knew everything that has happened and is going to happen, how anyone could have free will? If God knew that he, Jack, was going to be condemned to hell for the sinful life he has led, why was he born? Was it just to populate the earth with people God knew were going to fail to set an example for the better people? Why would He permit this to happen to Jack – create him just to end up in hell? If it’s all just going to happen the way God knows it’s going to happen, isn’t creating Jack just sadistic on God’s part? In response his father and Reverend Ames discuss predestination, free will and the like, a discussion Jack skewers with his retorts and quotes from the Bible. As the conversation proceeded and was on the verge of becoming heated, Lila spoke up. All she said was, “A person can change. Everything can change.”

And so, this is the story “Jack” completes. That in addition to redemption, there is failure. In addition to change, there is failure to change. Sometimes this failure is personal. Sometimes it is the failure of a culture as a whole. At the end of “Jack” I went back and reread the end of “Gilead,” and it was heartbreaking, heartbreaking in a way that it was not when I read it the first time without the benefit of the books that came later. I was heartbroken for Jack and Della and for the culture in which they found themselves, a culture in which we still find ourselves. I was heartbroken for us.

“Jack” completes the moral arc of these families begun in “Gilead” and the four books of the Gilead series are, taken as one, a revelation. They should be read and reread. What Robinson has created is nothing short of a classic.

From the American Association for Gifted Children, 1978, pg. 9, quoting a gifted boy: "We are not 'normal' and we know it; it can be fun sometimes but not funny always. We tend to be much more sensitive than other people. Multiple meanings, innuendos, and self-consciousness plague us. Intensive self-analysis, self-criticism, and the ability to recognize that we have limits makes us despondent." It is my contention that Jack Boughton is not only a gifted person, but what is defined as "twice exceptional." The novel JACK makes me recalibrate the essence of the other Gilead books. While the narrator of GILEAD is the old preacher John Ames, the protagonist is clearly Jack. The gentle, mostly wise old Pastor Ames can't allow himself to understand until near the end of the book that he has rejected and even hated Jack from the moment Jack's father "tricked" Ames into trying to accept the infant boy by naming him John Ames Boughton. He rejects Jack because he is still grieving for his own dead infant and sees Jack as a cuckoo child, a usurper. Ames can't even feel good when he touches Jack's brow to baptize him. The resentment is total and quickly suppressed, but Jack feels it then, and he feels it as he is growing up in a family so cohesive and righteous in their faith that there literally is no place for him to become himself. He was a difficult breach birth, hurting his mother even before his entry into a world he continues to feel is hostile to him. He quickly becomes the scapegoat of the family to the point that they suspect him not only of the small wrongs and pranks he does commit, but of larger, uglier crimes he does not. In other words, he feels early on that he can do nothing right and begins to act out and withdraw. His siblings love him, but they also love to worry about him and to tattle on him, keeping him the perpetual outsider. True to their faith, they also love to forgive him, over and over again. They love to despair over him and pray for him. You might say he is their most important family project, and it is not a success because try as they might, they can never understand him. The more they pray over him to become a good preacher's son, the more he feels compelled to act out against it. Old Ames thinks Jack's precociousness is arrogance, when in truth it is only an abiding insecurity. Jack learns early to hide his hurt under a veneer of indifference. Throughout GILEAD and HOME, he is testing his loved ones, and they keep failing the test, particularly his father, whose throwaway, thoughtless answers to Jack's probing questions about the Civil Rights struggle must cut Jack to the quick every time his father dismisses Jack's concerns. Old Ames dislikes Jack so much that he is sure Jack has come home in order to do something awful, like stealing Lila and his son away from him. Ames is convinced of it and can barely hide his jealousy even from himself. It isn't until Jack is finally able to share his secret with the old man that Ames understands how wrong he has done him, but even at the end, he cannot pass the ultimate test and embrace Jack's wife and child, invite them into his heart, and use his considerable influence to make Jacks' family life in Gilead possible or even bearable. As Jack gets ready to leave town, Ames finally finds within him the strength to bless him—not understanding that the only reason Jack is allowing this belated baptism is because he has given up on life altogether. In JACK, he tells Pastor Hutchins that he has been contemplating suicide but will not do it while his father is still alive. And he also says that Della is his sole reason for living. So in the end of GILEAD, when he thinks he will never see Della or his son again, and knows that his father is dying, we understand what his next step is likely to be. GILEAD has a more extensive timeline than JACK, and HOME goes one step further, in that we witness the irony of Della and his son showing up a couple of days after he disappears, so that he will never know that there has been a reprieve. I am struck by Glory's passion for the little girl who died and for the child's mother. She even considered kidnapping the baby and/or bringing its mother into town to live. Yet when Glory introduces herself to Jack's bi-racial son, she does not say, "I'm your aunt," instead, she says, "I'm your father's sister." Nor does she press Della and him very hard to come into the house, doesn't insist on exchanging addresses so they might stay in touch—all she does is hand the boy a souvenir of Jack as a good-bye gift. In HOME, we see Jack not through old Ames' jaundiced eyes but through Glory's resentful ones. As she slowly begins to register his humanity, we see that he was much more deeply affected by the big sin of his youth than his family ever understood. In truth, he was so shocked by his own misdeed that he condemns himself to permanent exile and a living death as punishment, a punishment he renews by sabotaging himself whenever things begin to go even the slightest bit well for him. Thus he makes himself fail at every task, every job, every relationship. His dream was that his family will accept Della and his son, but he soon realizes, each time his father reveals his prejudices, how impossible that dream actually is. In new-age terms, Jack and Della are twin souls. The author makes it obvious during the long cemetery dialogue, when they discover that they are on the same wavelength in so many ways. Souls have no race, no color, no age, no prejudices, no labels. Della and Jack know this instinctively. It is a knowledge so deep and immediate that they cannot ignore it. Della is everything Jack's family wants so much for him to be: an obedient child who cheerfully accepts the mold her father presses her into, growing into adulthood willing to live her life according to the wishes of her proud, loving, separatist father. And yet she longs to be free of his expectations but in a sense keeps being recaptured to follow the path her family has laid for her. Allowing herself to love Jack sets her free of this family bondage, but she remains trapped in a dehumanizing system of ever greater proportions. I have read that gifted children are special needs children, and that those needs are seldom met or even understood. Surely, Jack was such a child. Gifted children who are not understood are often oppositional. They might act out, and can have severe ADD, which they can easily disguise from the world because of their intelligence. Jack, who loves to learn, nonetheless makes his brother Teddy take his classes and write his exams. What appears as laziness might simply be an inability to remain focused. Just to make matters worse, he is born with the alcoholic gene. Once he takes his first drink, the syndrome is triggered and will dog him for the rest of his days. He drinks to punish himself. After the first sip, he is a goner. Every time he crawls out of the hole of his addiction and starts a new foothold in life, he soon sabotages himself with the next bout of drunkenness. His opinion of himself is so low that he sees himself as a jailbird even when he is not guilty. It's almost as if he's thinking, "if people think I am bad, then I must be bad." After he is convicted for something he didn't do, he considers himself every bit as guilty as the Judge who sentences him does. Jack sees himself as a draft dodger even though he is rejected as unsuitable by the military. Having been raised in the unworldly, religious atmosphere of his father's house in Gilead, he doesn't understand the rules of the gutter, is cheated out of his freedom, out of his pay, out of his cash, again and again. He sees himself as someone who has no rights and no claims, who deserves not only a living hell but is predestined for perdition. Although he rejects his family's religious faith, he retains the belief that he is worthless and deserves eternal damnation. Can you imagine how different the outcome would have been if his father had bequeathed the house to him instead of to Glory—or, better yet, to them both? Della and his son could have been able to come home to stay. If the author plans to continue the saga, a good place to take the next book would be to the two little boys, after each of them has lost his father. Can you imagine a time so cruel that Pastor Ames, who has served his town over his entire life, as did his father and grandfather before him, is convinced that as soon as he is dead, his wife and child will be ejected, with no place to live, no income, forced to move to a fallen down shack with a leaking roof where they might not survive the next winter? Can you imagine that Glory would NOT invite them to move into her big empty house? Can you imagine Jack's son standing at the door one day, as a teenager or young adult, his father's river-picture in his hands, looking for answers? I can. Anyone who wants to understand the nature of Jack should watch this video from ZDogg MD entitled, The Curse of the Gifted: The Challenges of High IQ Children

Stipulated: Marilynne Robinson is a genius and her art is original, powerful, nourishing, gorgeous without being "pretty." People will be reading HOUSEKEEPING, GILEAD and LILA long after you and I are gone.

Stipulated: JACK is the most challenging and least enjoyable of her Gilead series of novels. Jack Boughton, the character, is not good company and not easy to be with. The book is narrated from inside his head. We get hints of what other people think of him, but mostly it's about what Jack thinks of himself, and the problem is, he's a black hole. Everything disappears in him: resolutions, promises, fresh starts, truths and lies. He disappears them all just as he does the objects of his petty thefts.

Stipulated: It's impossible to know what Jack sees in Della and even more impossible to guess what Della sees in him. In all his shabby nobility, he's still pretty awful.

Stipulated: Every story proceeds from some givens; sometimes love is the given. We can begin from Boy (or Girl) loves Girl (or Boy) and understand it's not to be questioned. It's the foundation for working out the events of the story. If we don't know what Jack sees in Della, and still less what she sees in him, it's because Jack doesn't have the answers to those questions either.

Stipulated: There aren't many "events." Part of Robinson's magic is that she can build a plot development out of a character sitting alone in a closed, dark dance studio in the dead of night.

Stipulated: A Black minister's daughter and a white minister's son will of course have a common frame of reference. It's offensive to protest that Della and her people don't seem Black enough. They are the very sort of religious folk Jack's been around all his life, except for their race. And for Della's father's very interesting separatism, inspired by Marcus Garvey.

Stipulated: Faith, in all its contradictions and ineffability, is not just a preoccupation with Robinson, it's an investigation she is continually conducting. She interrogates Christianity in ways that I'm sure some of the faithful find shocking. But she's always asking the very questions we are asking, or should be asking.

I found JACK difficult, in a good way. Robinson is rooting around in the dark below the surface of us all for how a lost soul might become found, in the words of the hymn, even when law and custom and what's taken for "decency" are arrayed against him. I want Robinson to succeed, to demonstrate there's a way. Don't you? Wouldn't that be a good thing to study, at this point in history, at any point in history?

If she's done, then I am forever grateful for what Robinson has given us. But I can't help hoping she persists in her inquiry about goodness and love and how one solitary heart can find affirmation in a landscape and the stars and a plate of baked beans.

Marilynne Robinson has crafted one of the tenderest and loveliest love stories I’ve ever read, with sentences and thoughts deeply moving and luminescent. As in the other books in this series, the main theme is that of crippling racism. Jack and Della, the meeting of true minds in the book, face and almost impossible future in St. Louis, in the time wedged between World War II and the impending destruction of the black community of the city by eminent domain. I love Marilyn Robinson‘s books, and find myself looking up the references that I don’t quite understand; This extra work is really essential, as it brings into focus cultural references that I would’ve otherwise missed and that transform the book. A high recommendation, but not a beach read!