Jack does not have to be “Jack”: the prodigal son, doomed to a cycle of briefly raised hopes followed by inevitable disappointment. In the cemetery, the burdens and constraints of family, society, and history are for a short space suspended, and Jack and Della can be something like themselves-their actual selves, not the types their families and others have cast them as. But Robinson provocatively suggests that there is more to the self than that. Without familial expectations, the mores of community, the laws of the state, the conventions of social class, the book seems to ask, does a person still have a self? Most contemporary thinking would suggest no, we do not-the “self” is an effect constructed by our encounters with the world. This creates the somewhat eerie, free-floating mood of the night in the cemetery-to a large extent, our obligations define us. Robinson lets us feel every delicate, evanescent, seemingly impossible minute of it.Īlone overnight with no company but the dead and a wandering night guard, Jack and Della are temporarily free of all other obligations.
But as Jack and Della walk and talk among the late Victorian funerary art of Bellefontaine, they come to understand each other as they have never before understood by anyone. Readers might think that nothing is happening in this scene, that we are learning nothing important about the characters. There are no big set pieces in their talk-no elaborate confessions, no desperate avowals, no long anecdotes of personal history. The couple does not have sex, although they worry that whomever they encounter in the morning will assume that they did. Its audacity has nothing to do with shocking events or radical narrative experiment. This episode is surprisingly long, about seventy pages, and it is one of the most audacious scenes in recent American fiction.
Sometime after their conversation, Jack leaves a copy of Hamlet at Della’s door, which somehow-we are not told the specifics-leads to them spending a night walking and talking in St. The woman is Della, known by those same readers to be Jack’s spiritual wife (but, owing to Missouri’s miscegenation laws, not his legal one), the mother of Jack’s son, and the disowned daughter of a prominent African American family in Memphis, her father an AME bishop. The story begins with a man and woman in a tense conversation the man is Jack Boughton, already familiar to longtime Robinson readers as the prodigal son of the Boughton family and longtime thorn in the flesh of John Ames. Jack, Marilynne Robinson’s fourth novel, following Gilead, Home, and Lila, devoted to the families of John Ames and Robert Boughton, respectively the Congregationalist and Presbyterian pastors of Gilead, a small town in southwestern Iowa, during roughly the ten years following World War II, opens abruptly. Farrar, Straus and Giroux | September 29, 2020
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