Jack

Jack is the fourth novel in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead series, published in 2020. The series began in 2004 with Gilead, the Pulitzer winning novel told as a long letter from the elderly Reverend John Ames to his young son. It continued with Home in 2008 and Lila in 2014, each book deepening and complicating the world of the small Iowa town and the two families, the Ameses and the Boughtons, whose lives have been intertwined for generations.

This novel turns to Jack Boughton, the prodigal son of the Reverend Robert Boughton, the figure who has haunted the previous three books in the series. Jack appears in Gilead and Home as a wounded, drifting man, the source of his father’s grief and his sister Glory’s worried care. Jack tells the story of his earlier life in St. Louis in the 1940s and 1950s, where he is living in poverty and trying to maintain a fragile relationship with Della Miles, a Black schoolteacher. Their relationship, illegal under the anti miscegenation laws of the period, becomes the moral center of the novel.

Marilynne Robinson writes about religion, race, and grace with the kind of seriousness that almost no other contemporary American novelist attempts. The conversations between Jack and Della run for pages, working through Calvinist theology, Black church traditions, the particular weight of history that sits on their relationship, and the question of whether two damaged people can find their way to each other. The pacing is slow by any commercial standard. The reward for patience is a novel that takes the deepest questions seriously and refuses to give easy answers.

For Robinson’s longtime readers, Jack is the book that finally lets the prodigal son speak for himself. For new readers, the Gilead series is a project worth starting from the beginning, but Jack stands on its own as a novel about the long, painful work of becoming a person worthy of love.