Jack by Marilynne Robinson

I finished reading Jack by Marilynne Robinson last night. It was a very good book, as are all of Marilynne Robinson’s. She really is an extraordinary writer. This book is about the son of John Ames’ friend Robert Boughton, a Presbyterian minister in the town of Gilead, Iowa, where several others of Robinson’s books are set. Jack is named John Ames Boughton after the main character of the novel Gilead. John Ames, also a preacher. Jack is mostly set in St. Louis, with forays to Chicago and Memphis, but Gilead is present because it is such a part of Jack.

The book is the story of Jack and a woman he meets then falls in love with, Della Miles, a black woman teaching high school at a black school in St. Louis. Della’s father is a minister, too, of a Methodist church in Memphis. Jack is a self-professed bum. He has a drinking problem and lives a precarious life. Since Jack is set in the 1950’s, it is dangerous for Jack and Della to be seen together at all, let alone to have a relationship. But even if race was not an issue, Jack would not be the kind of man a father would want for his daughter. I was afraid Jack would be an unlikable main character and I would find it hard to read the book. But that was definitely not the case.

There were many lines that stood out for me and those are what I thought I would blog about. Here’s one where Della is talking to Jack.

“I just mean it’s strange that there is nothing more I want from life. If I could imagine an eternity of sitting here with you talking nonsense, there’d be nothing more I would want from death. I mean it. And I’m a good Christian woman.” Her voice was very calm, but there were tears on her cheeks. He touched them away.

This reminded me of something similar Harriet Vane says to Lord Peter Wimsey in Strong Poison. She and Peter are talking while she is in jail and being tried for murder.

"If anybody ever marries you, it will be for the pleasure of hearing you talk piffle," said Harriet, severely.

"A humiliating reason, but better than no reason at all."

"I used to piffle rather well myself," said Harriet, with tears in her eyes, "but it's got knocked out of me. You know—I was really meant to be a cheerful person—all this gloom and suspicion isn't the real me. But I've lost my nerve, somehow."

"No wonder, poor kid. But you'll get over it. Just keep on smiling, and leave it to Uncle Peter."

In another conversation, Harriet says something about how she would watch each moment come towards her, then pass by, and she would think, “I just made it through that one.,” or something like that. I wish I could find the direct quote. I think of it quite often. How sad it would be to just barely live through one agonizing moment after the other.

Reading what Della said about talking nonsense being the best thing she can imagine and Harriet loving Peter’s piffle somehow gives me joy. If we can be eternally grateful and happy for nonsensical, lighthearted talk, how wonderful that is. We don’t have to mourn the fact that we didn’t do something lofty and great as long as we enjoyed time together with our loved ones, even if we only engaged in silly talk.

Another conversation between Della and Jack:

”We all have souls, true?”

He laughed, “Please go on.”

“We do. We know this, but just because it’s a habit to believe it, not because it is really visible to us most of the time. But 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. There is no turning away. You’ve seen the mystery—you’ve seen what life is about. What it’s for…There is nothing to be said about it except that it is a holy human soul. And it is a miracle when you recognize it.”

Her eyes were lovely with seriousness, he knew, though she didn’t look at him. Still he had to laugh. “Am I to understand that you are speaking here of one Jack Broughton?”

She nodded, “I learned this from you. From meeting you…”

“So I am immune from all judgment, on account of my celestial nature?”

“Other people are, too, or they should be. But since it’s your soul I’ve seen, I know better than to think about you the way people do when they judge. The Lord says ‘Judge not’ because when He looks at people, He just sees souls. That’s all…”

“The Lord says ‘Judge not’ because when He looks at people, He just sees souls.” How about that? It reminds me of Thomas Merton’s encounter on the corner of Fourth and Walnut.

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world. . . .

This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. . . . I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed. . . . But this cannot be seen, only believed and ‘understood’ by a peculiar gift.

I think of that sometimes when I’m in the car surrounded by all these other individuals and groups in cars. I think how each of them is in the center of their complicated life the same way I am. God looks at each of them and sees someone just as important to him as I am, someone he loves just as he loves me.

Jack often wonders how it is that even though his goal is to be harmless, so often he causes harm. It baffles him. He simply cannot figure out what to do or not do that others seem to just know. He often makes small decisions such as whether to stand or sit, stay or follow, or what to say with no idea if it’s the right decision or not, just hoping it is and won’t cause problems. He has compulsions, too, that are hard to control. Robinson describes his trouble knowing what to do, his compulsion to steal things and other ways he goes through life this way:

Then it was that he had first realized what an exquisite thing harmlessness must be,…He would abandon all casuistry, surrender all thought of greater and lesser where transgressions were concerned, even drop the distinction between accident and intention. He was struggling in a web of interrelation, setting off consequences in every direction that he could not predict or control or even imagine…His brain was at least as sticky as his fingers. That old problem of mine and thine…

…And so he had lived, more or less, until he met Della. A little thievery when the opportunity was too patent to be ignored, or too interesting. A drinking bout for some reason or no reason. A stint in prison. Then an occasion for him to try out his manners…

“That old problem of mine and thine.” That’s good, isn’t it? And the list of “a little thievery” and “a drinking bout” and “a stint in prison,” then “an occasion for him to try out his manners.” Is that how it is when you are living the life of what we call a bum? Are you kind of bumbling through life not really meaning to do harmful or stupid things but just somehow doing them, this and then that?

Jack sat down once and “thought what it might be like if the miraculous became the natural order of things.”

Loaves and fishes in exhaustible supply. Troops of Lazaruses putting off their cerements. Infinite hours where Della was always waiting for him, and he was somehow not a disappointment.

“Troops of Lazaruses.” Ha ha. What other miracles might have been included? Hordes of lepers healed and saying thank you. Blind men lined up, one after another receiving a mix of dirt and saliva on their eyes and slowly seeing those blurry tree-shaped things turn into people. A hospital ward full of children dying in beds, Jesus walking up to touch each one and on his word they rise up restored to health. A whole village of buildings with holes in their roofs and friends lowering their friend through them where Jesus tells them to get up and walk and they do.

So anyway, it’s a good book with good characters and story and amazing writing.