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Summary
Summary
Robinson's slow prose is the star here, and narrator Adam Verner gives great depth of emotion to Jack's raw suffering and ethical dilemmas...Come for the love story; stay for a couple who learn to find the beauty in broken humanity, and what grace can look like for those who love each other. -- Booklist
This program includes a bonus conversation with the author.
Marilynne Robinson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, returns to the world of Gilead with Jack, the latest novel in one of the great works of contemporary American fiction
Marilynne Robinson's mythical world of Gilead, Iowa--the setting of her novels Gilead , Home , and Lila , and now Jack --and its beloved characters have illuminated and interrogated the complexities of American history, the power of our emotions, and the wonders of a sacred world. Jack is Robinson's fourth novel in this now-classic series. In it, Robinson tells the story of John Ames Boughton, the prodigal son of Gilead's Presbyterian minister, and his romance with Della Miles, a high school teacher who is also the child of a preacher. Their deeply felt, tormented, star-crossed interracial romance resonates with all the paradoxes of American life, then and now.
Robinson's Gilead novels, which have won one Pulitzer Prize and two National Book Critics Circle Awards, are a vital contribution to contemporary American literature and a revelation of our national character and humanity.
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Author Notes
Marilynne Robinson is the author of the novels Lila , Home , Gilead (winner of the Pulitzer Prize), and Housekeeping , and the nonfiction books, When I Was a Child I Read Books , Mother Country , The Death of Adam , and Absence of Mind . She teaches at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Robinson's stellar, revelatory fourth entry in her Gilead cycle (after Lila) focuses on Jack Boughton, the prodigal son of a Gilead, Iowa, minister, and the beginnings of his romance with Della Miles before his 1957 return to Gilead in Home. Jack, who disparagingly styles himself "the Prince of Darkness," finds his life spiraling out of control in St. Louis, where, after dodging the draft during WWII, he spends several years increasingly prone to bouts of heavy drinking, petty theft, and vagrancy. His tailspin is interrupted when he meets Della Miles, an English teacher from a prominent Black family in Memphis. Despite a disastrous first date, the details of which are hinted at in the beginning, and over the numerous objections of Della's family and white strangers, Jack and Della fall in love, bound by a natural intimacy and mutual love of poetry. Robinson's masterly prose and musings on faith are on display as usual, and the dialogue is keen and indelible. ("Once in a lifetime, maybe, 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," Della tells Jack.) This is a beautiful, superbly crafted meditation on the redemption and transcendence that love affords. (Sept.)
Booklist Review
Jack Boughton has been present, even when he was painfully absent, throughout Robinson's profound saga--Gilead (2004), Home (2008), and Lila (2014)--and now he steps forward to illuminate the hidden facets of his peripatetic life of lies, thievery, bad luck, and dangerous love. Robinson's latest glorious work of metaphysical and moral inquiry, nuanced feelings, intricate imagination, and exquisite sensuousness begins at night inside the locked gates of a St. Louis cemetery where Jack, an alcoholic, sarcastic, and self-loathing white man living rough, encounters the woman he loves, Della Miles, who is a disciplined, poetry-loving, Black, and a devoted high school history teacher. Both are the conflicted children of preachers. Their conversation in the mortuary dark is sparring, existential, and frank, despairing and elated, a high-stakes variation on the courtship-through-conversation in Lila between Reverend Ames and the young stranger who becomes his second wife. But no such happy ending awaits Jack and Della: marriage between their races is not only scandalous but illegal. Jack tries to get right, while Della, a pillar of strength, integrity, and love, contends with her enraged family. Myriad manifestations of pain are evoked, but here, too, are beauty, humor, mystery, and joy as Robinson holds us rapt with the exactitude of her perceptions and the exhilaration of her hymnal cadence, and so gracefully elucidates the complex sorrows and wonders of life and spirit.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The newest, avidly awaited novel in National Humanities Medal winner Robinson's acclaimed Gilead saga grapples with urgent questions of race, faith, and equality.
Guardian Review
Marilynne Robinson, having attained over the past four decades the status of literature's spiritual leader, now expands her acclaimed Gilead trilogy into a quartet with a new novel, Jack. It might perhaps be best described as a Calvinist romance - and certainly it is difficult to imagine any other contemporary writer who could achieve so improbable a conflation of doctrine and feeling. In 2004, 24 years after her debut Housekeeping saw her greeted as a writer of magisterial wisdom and skill, Robinson published Gilead. It takes the form of a single letter written in 1956 by the Rev John Ames to his young son: Ames's heart is failing, and he wishes to leave behind him an account of his life and faith. The novel is distinguished by an exacting and capacious intelligence, together with an enthralled sensibility that elevates the ordinary - a child's game, the passage of the midwestern light - to the sublime. Ames is greatly attached to his friend Robert Boughton, a retired minister whose son Jack is the cause of much fatherly sorrow, having absented himself from home and from God. When, towards the end of the novel, this prodigal son returns, he confides the secret of his absence not to his father, but to Ames. The two novels that followed did not serve as sequels, since time for Robinson is not linear but circuitous, dependent on the repression and recursion of memory; rather, they appear more as movements in a symphony, amplifying and repeating Gilead's established motifs. Each casts light on the events of Gilead from different sources of illumination: in Home (2008), Jack's sister Glory returns to care for her father; in Lila (2014), the young wife of John Ames, expecting their child, reflects on her transient childhood and wonders "why things happen the way they do". In this fourth novel - which might be read alone, or interposed between any of its companions - Robinson turns her gaze on Jack Boughton, the prodigal son in his prodigal years. He is ragged, thin and shiftless, helplessly in bondage to a sinful disposition: a liar, a thief and a drunkard. "I am at the centre of a certain turbulence," he says, painfully conscious that he might be taken for "any bum dozing on a bench ¿ steeped in beer and sunshine". It is not the sins of the fathers that are visited on this wayward child, but their virtues - he is as steeped in scripture as much as in beer, but experiences this divine knowledge as a burden, believing himself beyond redemption. Leaving Gilead and his father behind, he has become a vagrant in broken-down shoes. In a small town, and in sudden rain, he encounters by chance Della Miles, a young schoolteacher and the daughter of a bishop. Remarkably swiftly, and yet persuasively, these "strayed angels" find themselves in love. He steals a copy of Hamlet from her pocket; they exchange lines of poetry; locked all night in a graveyard, carefully circumnavigating desire, they discuss Shakespeare and theology and the matter of the stars. For Jack, it is a catastrophe; he believes himself a wrecker of lives, and yet "here he was, entrusted again ¿ with another human soul". He edges painfully towards respectability, and signals his willingness to remain in Della's town by placing a potted geranium in his small bare room. He discovers that Della in her gentle way "was making everything easier. What would she find becoming in him? That was what he did." Occasionally Della appears too virtuous by half, sanctified by love to an extent you'd think would put her beyond the touch of any human hand, still less that of a ne'er-do-well. But since the entirety of the novel is placed within the consciousness of Jack, we conceive of her as he does: the arrival of an unsought and unmerited grace. That she is a black woman further places a barrier between them, since even if Jack were to exchange the beer bottle for an ordered and virtuous life, racist laws would forbid the marriage. Here Robinson interrogates and inverts the structures of power: Della's family has respectability and status, and when her father the bishop meets Jack he gives him "a look like a rifle shot". This is not a new theme emerging, with Robinson hastening to respond to the Black Lives Matter movement, but rather the continuation of her examination of America's racial trauma, which began in Gilead, with Ames reflecting on the life of his abolitionist grandfather. Robinson's style, which in her debut, Housekeeping, could fly off into ecstatic moments in a kind of surreal metaphysics, has been refined into a restrained and occasionally almost casual lexis, concerned with a penetrating engagement with psychological realism and the lasting import of apparently small acts. Of all her novels, this is the most frankly amusing: the deep moral seriousness of Robinson's vision is frequently leavened with set pieces that almost approach farce, such as when Jack attempts to distinguish his own kitten from numerous identical street cats by dousing it with cheap aftershave. The events of the novel - which are few - do not always occur in the order of time: they arrive on the page as if they have just at that moment been remembered. I confess to a degree of confusion in my early attempts to impose order, until in due course I understood the novel's proposition that the matter of causality is irrelevant, if the love that arises between Della and Jack is more or less divinely ordained. Nonetheless, the novel has a propulsive force: Jack concludes that the fullest expression of his love for Della must be to withdraw that love entirely, leaving her to recommence her respectable life. So he leaves; will he return? On this question hangs a world of theology and philosophy - it is all a matter of predestination, of redemption, of how best to navigate the waters of morality, desire, trust. "Another theological question," writes Robinson: "how one human being can mean so much to another ¿ as if loyalty were as real as gravity." So this is a Calvinist romance, and set against a contemporary fondness for novels that deal pessimistically with an individual psychology, unloosed from any philosophical or religious foundation beyond a little light politics or feminism, Robinson's insistence on her radiant, uncynical vision, deeply rooted in St Paul and Augustine and Feuerbach, appears downright radical. She is concerned with what the theologians call "common grace"; the capacity shared by all human creatures for receiving the gifts of life with wonder and gratitude, quite irrespective of belief or unbelief in God. In her essay collection When I Was a Child I Read Books she writes, "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". Jack's task is to discover whether his father's doctrines may after all not crush the love that arrived, unasked and unwanted, in a graveyard, but in fact elevate it to evidence of the divine. George Eliot, discarding the rigid scriptures of her youth, conceived of the idea of God as "really moral in its influence - it really cherishes all that is best and loveliest in man". This has been Robinson's project: to perceive "this teeming world", as she puts it, "so steeped in its sins", and all the same to insist on what is best and loveliest. The reader may well feel subject to a sermon, but the sermon is necessary and rarely heard. "When the Lord shows you a little grace," thinks Jack, "he won't mind if you enjoy it."
Kirkus Review
A sometimes tender, sometimes fraught story of interracial love in a time of trouble. "I have never heard of a white man who got so little good out of being a white man." So chides Della Miles, upbraiding John Ames Boughton at the opening of Robinson's latest novel, set in an unspecified time, though certainly one of legal racial segregation. Jack hails from Gilead, Iowa, where so many of Robinson's stories are set, and he has a grave waiting there that he seems in a headlong rush to occupy. He drinks, he steals, he wanders, he's a vagrant. Now he's in the black part of St. Louis, an object of suspicion and concern, known locally as "That White Man That Keeps Walking Up and Down the Street All the Time." Della is a schoolteacher, at home in Shakespeare and the classics. Jack is inclined to Milton. He is Presbyterian by birth, she Methodist and pious--but not so much that she can't laugh when he calls himself the Prince of Darkness. Both are the children of ministers, both smart and self-aware, happy to argue about poetry and predestination in a whites-only graveyard. The arguments continue, both playful and serious, as their love grows and as Jack tries his hand at the workaday world, wearing a tie and working a till--and, more important, not drinking. Pledged to each other like Romeo and Juliet, they suffer being parted more than they do having to deal with the disapproval of others, whether white or black, though Della's father, aunt, brothers, and sister all separately tell Jack to leave her alone, and once, when Jack's landlady finds out that Della is black, she demands that he leave. The reader will by this time doubtless be pulling for them, though also wondering how the proper Della puts up with the definitively scruffy Jack, even if it's clear that they love each other without reservation. Robinson's storytelling relies heavily on dialogue, moreso than her other work, and involves only a few scene changes, as if first sketched out as a play. The story flows swiftly--and without a hint of inevitability--as Robinson explores a favorite theme, "guilt and grace met together." An elegantly written proof of the thesis that love conquers all--but not without considerable pain. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
This new work is a prequel to Robinson's Pulitzer-winning Gilead, but one needn't have read the previous novel to appreciate or enjoy it. It follows Jack Boughton, a white drifter, occasional thief, and alcoholic, and his romance with Della Miles, a respectable Black schoolteacher. Although their circumstances (not to mention the law) should keep them apart in St. Louis before the civil rights era, they are drawn to each other based on their shared experience as "preacher's kids" and their love of poetry. After a brief prolog, the novel opens with a lengthy account of a night the two spend in a cemetery talking about life and faith. This helps the reader recognize Jack and Della as soulmates before fully understanding the circumstances of their acquaintance or knowing the extent of Jack's past misdeeds. Against Jack's better judgment and despite considerable pressure from Della's family and a Baptist minister he befriends, Jack is unable to remove himself from Della's life, and her unwavering faith in him leads to a kind of redemption. VERDICT Robinson fans will be hungry for the next chapter in the Gilead saga, and the beauty and humanity of Robinson's prose will win over new fans. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 2/24/20.]--Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis
