Jack by Marilynne Robinson, review: love and tragedy in the time of Jim Crow

The Jack of the title is, by his own account, a “-confirmed, inveterate bum”, the now-faithless son of a Presbyterian minister from Iowa whose life has gone very wrong. Della, with whom he is in love, is “a wonderful, gentle woman. She’s educated. She’s a minister’s daughter, an English teacher.”

Or so Jack at one point tries to tell his landlady, to persuade her she should try seeing beyond the fact that Della is “a colored lady”. But we are in the early 1950s, and this revelation only gets him thrown out of his lodgings and threatened with the police.

Marilynne Robinson’s novel has some of the beats of a romantic comedy. The principals are charismatic, their conversation sparky. The setting, St Louis, Missouri, where the American Midwest starts to turn into the south, has charm aplenty. But like in Romeo and Juliet’s Verona, our lovers are one overheard remark, one observed kiss away from tragedy.

Robinson is aiming at something more timeless and considered than the schlocky love-in-the-time-of-Jim-Crow that could be made out of these materials. Jack can be read as a stand-alone, but the book gains much from what many readers will bring to it of their knowledge of its central character from his appearances in the trilogy of novels that preceded this one.

In Gilead, set a few years after the events of Jack, Jack Boughton is seen almost entirely through the wary, anxious eyes of the Reverend John Ames, a friend of his father’s, who knows a little about Jack’s tendency to destroy anything he touches. In Home, Jack is refracted through the eyes of his sister, Glory, who briefly sees him – the Christ-like imagery is not accidental – as “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and as one from whom men hide their face”. This time, we see things through Jack’s own eyes, and learn that his favourite poem is the one by Robert Frost that begins: “I have been one acquainted with the night./ I have walked out in rain – and back in rain.”

There is a good deal of poetry in Jack and Della’s courtship, restrained and chaste: conversations about Hamlet, recommendations of new books (he likes William Carlos Williams, she W H Auden). Their exchanges have the flinty irony appropriate to people without the slightest illusion about the realities of their place and time. If their conversation occasionally seems a little too assured and literate, perhaps it is because we are to read it the way we read Hamlet, without inferring that Danish nobles spoke in blank verse.

Jack could hardly be unmarked by the author’s awareness of American politics today. But Jack could, in principle, have been written in the 1950s, so respectful is Robinson of the constraints on action and imagination placed by her historical setting. Her characters find no comfort in the consciousness that the Montgomery bus boycott is a couple of years ago, and that they may even live to see the presidency of Barack Obama. Like in Gilead, as much a recounting of the legacy of the American Civil War as it is the story of an Iowan family, the politics is everywhere present but only sporadically visible.

For the most part, the tension of the book emerges from its moral and theological concerns. As Jack once puts it to a minister trying to be helpful: “It’s not always clear to me how to tell grace from, you know, punishment.” The abstract formulation conceals the acutely personal form the question takes in his own mind: “If the thought of someone sweetened your life to the point of making it tolerable, even while you knew that just to be seen walking down the street with her might do her harm, which one was that?”

Is this story bound to end in -tragedy? Indeed, what realistic ending to this story could even count as happy? Martin Luther is supposed to have laughed at the suggestion that happiness might be the end of human life. Some Protestants, among them Robinson, have taken seriously what he proposed as an alternative: “Suffering, suffering; the cross, the cross.”

“I suppose the next time I tell it, it will be a better story. Maybe a little less true.” These were the self-deprecating words of John Ames in Lila, the previous book in this sequence. Every time Robinson tells this story, it is both a better story and truer.