Jack by Marilynne Robinson

‘He watched her go until he could discern her, just. A gentle disturbance in the darkness, a warmer darkness where she was. That plum coat. She might be walking away from him, weary of him. He thought he might as well follow. What could it matter? At the first hint that he was not welcome, he would step away. Actually, it would be the second hint, if her walking away was the first.’

Jack (pages 65-66 in the Virago recommended edition)

What peculiar twist of fate could possibly draw together a Black American high-school teacher and a down-at-heel white man in the segregated days of 1940s Missouri? Yet just such an encounter – in the twilight gloom of a graveyard amongst trees and tombs, Hamlet and doggerel poetry – sparks the unlikeliest of flames. The romance between Della Miles and Jack Boughton struggles against family resistance and society’s miscegenation laws. Harder though are the couple’s inner doubts and fears. For Della, associating with a drunkard and ne’er-do-well risks her self-esteem, the good name of her family, and her job. Whilst Jack, full of Calvinist premonitions of perdition, feels torn between the depths of his love and the terror of his self-knowledge. How can Jack honour his love for Della when he teeters so often on the edge of self-destruction? Would he love her better and protect her more by simply walking away?

Set in the years after World War II, Marilynne Robinson returns to the world of Gilead and the Ames family, this time to give the account of the family’s symbolic prodigal son. In Jack, Robinson explores a life imbued by Calvinist theology:

‘One of the crucial things [Calvin] brings to me, is that the encounter with another being is an occasion in which you can, to the best of your ability, honour the other person as being someone sent to you by God.’

Marilynne Robinson, When I was a Child I Read Books

What this ‘sending’ means for Jack is played out in the tenderness and fragility of his encounter with Della through a story which forms the final novel in Robinson’s Gilead quartet. Whilst each book in the series (Gilead, Home, Lila and Jack) focuses on a familiar set of relationships, each novel reweaves the story from a sufficiently different point of view for the books to stand alone as a separate but interconnected works.

STUDY DETAILS:

• Five meetings, Thursdays, 5.00-7.00 pm (UK), 1-29 February 2024
• Led by Nicky von Fraunhofer
• Recommended edition: Virago ISBN: 9-780349-011790-0
• £175 for five two-hour meetings, to include opening notes and resources