Reviews
Andy Boyd
Book Reviewed:
Jack
Marilynne Robinson
FSG
2020
Midway through the book that bears his name, Jack Boughton confesses his sins to a Black preacher, saying, “I’m a bad but confirmed drunk. I have no talent for friendship. What talents I do have I make no use of. I am aware instantly and almost obsessively of anything fragile, with the thought that I must and will break it. This has been true of me my whole life. I isolate myself as a way of limiting the harm I can do. And here I am with a wife!” This is too much even for the preacher, who exclaims “Good Lord.”
A reader of Jack might have a similar exasperated reaction to its central character, asking, why’s it so hard for Jack to act right? But Marilynne Robinson is asking a different question. Instead of investigating how Jack became the reprobate he is, she begins the novel from his rock bottom and asks whether it is possible for a confirmed sinner to truly repent. Jack concludes that repentance is possible, but not through sheer will. Change comes through love rooted in the very fact of the beloved’s humanity. In other words, through grace.
Jack is the fourth and likely last entry in a series of novels that began with Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2004 book Gilead. Gilead introduced us to Jack through the perceptions of its narrator, Rev. John Ames. Jack, whose full name is John Ames Boughton, appears seemingly out of nowhere as the lost-sheep son of Ames’ oldest friend and fellow pastor Robert Boughton. Ames is wary of Jack, especially after Jack begins spending time with Ames’ young son and wife, Lila. The source of his wariness is made clear late in the book when Ames tells Jack’s story, or what he knows of it. When Jack was still a young man, he impregnated and then abandoned a desperately poor girl. She gave birth, and the child lived for three years before dying of an infection from a cut foot. Jack left the town of Gilead, Iowa shortly after, and hasn’t been seen since. Now he’s back, to the delight of old Robert Boughton and the consternation of John.
But this turns out not to be Jack’s whole story. Jack is back in Gilead not to atone for his past but to plan for his future. He tells Ames that he has a wife and a child, and hands him a photograph. Ames is surprised to discover they are Black. Would Gilead, Jack asks, welcome his interracial family? Jack’s story causes Ames to feel genuine compassion for him for the first time.
After Gilead Robinson published Home in 2008, telling the same story from the Boughtons’ point of view. Then, in 2014, she published Lila, which told the story of Lila’s life prior to the events of Gilead. Now, in 2020, we have Jack, the latest and probably last book in the series.
One central belief of Christianity is that no person can adequately judge another, both because we are all sinners and because our knowledge of someone else is always partial. The novels that followed Gilead broadened the reader’s understanding of the characters in