In Housekeeping (1980), a train slips off a bridge and sinks silently into the depths of Fingerbone Lake. “Aunts weigh in.WE ARE NOT UNUSED to Marilynne Robinson’s characters wondering about the secret lives of things and people, their untold tales and deep histories. When Della tells him her aunt is dropping by and would like to see him, he knows he’s being inspected and prepared for dismissal. He’s the kind of man who, when he takes off his hat to inspect its worn lining, people toss coins in it. She writes about faith without piousness, art without snobbery, and when she gets deep into her characters’ heads, gives their emotional crises complexity and contours.Īnd while nobody reads Robinson for laughs, “Jack” is also often a funny novel because Jack’s sense of self is tied up in his ridiculousness – that is, his being a target for ridicule. The misstep is all the stranger because the remainder of “Jack” shows why Robinson is a singular figure in American fiction. Robinson plainly intends the setup to be eerily poignant – where else might an interracial couple at the time have an extended conversation, uninterrupted, unafraid, and unjudged? But the scene feels more like a potted and stiff one-act play than a nuanced portrait of what connects this unlikely, troubled couple. That exchange occurs during the novel’s peculiar opening sequence, a 70-page stretch in which the two are locked overnight in the city’s historic Bellefontaine Cemetery. “No,” she responds, “you’re a talkative man with holes in his socks.” “I am the Prince of Darkness,” Jack self-pityingly declares. Yet she shares his passion for poetry, respects his grasp of scripture, and is lovingly unimpressed with his self-loathing. There’s little to recommend him to her – he’s a self-declared “confirmed, inveterate bum,” semi-employed and living in a flophouse. Louis with Della, a teacher and daughter of a strict Memphis, Tennessee, minister.

“Jack” doesn’t clear up every mystery, but it does provide some backstory, tracking the early days of his romance in St.

In the mid-century Midwest that the “Gilead” cycle covers, he’s a scandal on two ill-shod feet.īut while Jack is a familiar figure in Robinson’s books, he’s also a cagey, mysterious one. He’s a hard-drinking and occasionally suicidal thief, a white preacher’s son who abandoned the destitute teenage girl he had a child with, then fell in love with Della, a Black woman. Jack Boughton, introduced in Robinson’s Pulitzer-winning 2004 novel, “Gilead,” is the quintessential prodigal son. Watch Video: Comedians Desus and Mero on cancel culture, new bookįor devoted readers of Marilynne Robinson, the title alone of her fifth novel, “Jack” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pp., ★★★ out of four), should stir a host of emotions.

Marilynne robinson jack