Jack by Marilynne Robinson

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pp.

By Paul W. Gleason

Two great themes have troubled Marilynne Robinson’s novels: race and sin. This is hardly surprising. Robinson is as profoundly American as she is profoundly religious, and these are two of the great problems of American religious and national life. Race and sin are the sum of things un-hoped for, the evidence that good American Protestants would rather not see.

Jack is about little else. Accordingly, Robinson leaves the small town of Gilead, Iowa (the primary setting of her last three novels) for the mixed-race metropolis of St. Louis. She keeps some of her old characters, though, most notably Jack.

Jack is a lifelong thief, a compulsive drinker, and a constant source grief to his father, a Presbyterian minister. “He saw signs of reprobation in me, hard as he tried not to,” Jack tells Della, a black woman who is also a minister’s child. “Reasonably enough. I kept him pretty well supplied with them.” The novel follows their strange and unsteady courtship. It must overcome both social barriers and Jack’s sense that he is lost, and would only take Della with him.  

Robinson is, famously, a Calvinist. She is probably the most famous self-described Calvinist in America. Few others would wrap themselves in Calvin’s mantle, not least because of what he has to say about sin: humanity is “utterly perverse” and lives in a state of “total depravity.” That sounds bad, but a look at the Latin roots makes it worse. “Perverse” and “depraved” descend from Latin words with meanings like crooked, turned, and twisted. God created humanity good, but the Fall damaged human nature, twisting it around from good to evil, and as a result human beings are completely incapable, absent grace, of being good. They are far more likely to want and do ill—to others and themselves.  

Calvin wrote it, Jack is living it. As he confesses to a black pastor, “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.” After years of following these impulses, “I isolate myself as a way of limiting the harm I can do.”  

Isolation isn’t enough. Throughout the novel every one of his acts, no matter how small, seems to hurt someone. Even “recommending a book of poetry to someone became displacement that struck where it would, as it would, converting itself in midair into malice or stupidity. How did people live? His oldest question.”  Jack seems to live under a cosmic curse. But a good Calvinist would hasten to add that Jack is not alone. The difference between him and the other characters in Robinson’s novels is not that he is damned and they are saved; the difference is that Jack is exquisitely and excruciatingly aware of the condition that afflicts them all.

Falling in love with Della draws Jack out of isolation and into “that old feeling that he was enmeshed in a web of potential damage that became actual one way or another.” He could lose his room in a boarding house, and even his odd jobs. She runs even greater risks. She could lose her job as a schoolteacher and the respect of her entire family. If they decided to have children, “society was a great collaboration devoted to making everything difficult and painful to no good end.”

In Robinson’s previous novels race typically hid out of sight, though it always exerted a subtle, almost gravitational influence on her characters. Now the issue is inescapable. Perhaps surprisingly, the immediate obstacle to Jack and Della’s union is not municipal anti-miscegenation laws, but her family. A devotee of Marcus Garvey’s Black Nationalism, Della’s father tells Jack that he expects Della to devote herself “to a certain way of life, one meant to develop self-sufficiency in the Negro race by the practice of separatism.”

His separatism makes sense against the social backdrop of the novel. As Jack learns, the city has exercised eminent domain and “decided to demolish her side of town, churches and all, and replace it with something or other at some point in time.” No freeways planned yet, no urban renewal. Just a perverse desire to destroy a community. It’s common enough to hear slavery called America’s “original sin,” but Robinson is reinvigorating that dead metaphor with the old Calvinist theology. The city of St. Louis, and beyond it the nation, seems to have a depraved relationship to its black population, an overwhelming impulse to harm it. As he looks at the doomed church and imagines its destruction, Jack “knew that he was not only a part of society, he was its essence, its epitome.”

It’s an evocative and suggestive idea. It also shows up unannounced two-thirds of the way through the novel, rather than running as a theme through the whole story. Although structure has never been Robinson’s main concern (asked by the Paris Review if she “plots her novels,” she replied, “I really don’t”), at times Jack meanders. For instance, the first scene is a tight six pages on the aftermath of Jack and Della’s disastrous first date The second scene is 70 pages of them talking in a graveyard. The universe of this novel could use a bit more fine-tuning.  

But few read Marilynne Robinson’s novels for plot or social commentary. She belongs to the American tradition of visionary Protestantism (and post-Protestantism) that runs from John Cotton and Jonathan Edwards to Emerson, Melville, and Whitman. Their stylistic extravagance and metaphysical daring all makes sense in light of (Robinson’s understanding of) “Calvin’s metaphor—nature is a shining garment in which God is revealed and concealed.” There is no register too exalted to do creation justice.

There are plenty of revelatory moments in Jack, and the best belong to Della. She sees divinity less in nature than in people. “Once in a lifetime, maybe, you look at a stranger and you see a soul, a glorious presence out of place in the world,” she tells Jack. And as she sees it, the soul has “no history among the things of this world, no guilt or injury or failure. No more than a flame would have.” 

Robinson leaves Jack’s ultimate fate unknown. He is left pondering “another theological question, how one human being can mean so much to another human being…as if loyalty were real as gravity. His father said it had to be that real, because the Lord is loyal. Jack was just then feeling the force of the idea.”

Paul W. Gleason is an associate editor at Psychiatric Times. He holds a PhD in religious studies and frequently reviews books on American religion, literature, and political economy. A member of the National Book Critics Circle's "Emerging Critics" class of 2018, he was recently a finalist for The Washington Monthly's "Kukula Award for Excellence in Nonfiction Book Reviewing."