Meg Fancher

Dispatches from the Prince of Darkness

Self-preoccupation in Marilynne Robinson’s “Jack”

Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead is about as perfect as a certain sort of novel can be: a gentle religio-philosophical rumination on greater grace and humanism, threaded through with a specific, deeply repressed animosity that threatens to curdle the protagonist’s entire self-conception. After each time I’ve finished it, I’ve thought, “I would like more of this, but with less self-control and more disreputability.” Such are my powers of manifestation; with Jack, Marilynne Robinson has obliged.

Jack is a straightforward prequel to Gilead; the latter’s final-act revelation hasn’t happened yet. I’ll skim over the fact that Jack is good, except to say it’s great, in favor of giving an example of what kind of good it is, so you know the mood you should be in to receive its greatness. At one point the protagonist, John Ames Boughton, the scoundrel of Iowa, finds himself politely chivvied into the bathroom of his beloved Della’s house to make himself more presentable. Alight at a tabernacle of domesticity, he plucks an artificial violet off a bouquet from the window—“just one little bloom”—and leaves with it. Two weeks and ten pages later, he receives a letter from her:

He would have to sit down somewhere to read it. Somewhere private. It did not say, “Stop walking past my house,” because he had stopped, with some effort. Of course, two weeks was not long enough to demonstrate his resolve, which was considerable, though she didn’t know that. She was not asking him to return anything he had pocketed. That one tiny flower.

You’re in a place for this to make you cry “Agh!” into the night, or you’re not. 

He has had to vow not to walk past her house, or approach her, or be seen with her in any way, because Della’s Black, she’s in love with him against the dictates of good sense, and he has a lifelong compulsion to break delicate things. Jack is obsessed with the mythology of his own identity: Is he a good person or a bad person? He was once sent to prison for a theft he didn’t carry out, but he does steal. He loves Della and desperately wants not to hurt her, but by all the measures by which larger society judges hurt, he maims her. If badness is a function of social acceptability and legality, Jack is as dangerous to most people as his namesake—Reverend John Ames, Gilead’s aforementioned protagonist and religio-philosophical ruminator—fears. And he knows this, hence his hypersensitivity (for a white guy) about causing harm, a preoccupation with the spider web consequences of his actions that he attempts to mitigate by staying solitary. “Dear Jesus, keep me harmless,” he thinks. “He knew what that meant. Keep me alone.” 

But he can’t keep away from Della, and when he’s with her, they perform love through bounding little acts of politeness and conscientiousness that, by the metrics of their lives, are like diamond rings. Jack lives or dies by whether or not Della’s hand rests on his arm, a tiny sacred touch that calls to mind Eloise Wengler’s memory, in Salinger’s “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” of Walt Glass’s claim that resting one hand on her stomach was so unfairly wonderful that he oughta smash his other hand through the bus window. Jack draws Della roses that won’t wilt, escorts her throughout an inadvertent night spent in a cemetery, and lets her workshop his poems. Also sometimes he walks out on dates with her because debt collectors have shown up to pummel his face.

For a long stretch of the novel, Jack seems to be overselling his apparent malignancy—he pilfers things, and rather too occasionally gets drunk, and lies by omission (at about the same rate as everyone else); but he’s respectful of kittens and a good dancer and generally awash with more chill vibes than, say, the clerk at his flophouse, who takes a fifty percent cut of the allowance Teddy Boughton sends him. But, as Reverend John Ames once agonized to describe and Jack himself can only speak of using unspecified pronouns, Jack has committed one truly harmful act of selfishness and neglect in his past, and he knows he carries the potential—the same inclinations, the same body, the same constitution—to do it all over again. Thus does Jack’s high school courting of Della strike us as less twee the longer it lasts.

—

Jack’s struggle toward a personal version of grace looks different than the Reverend’s, and the events of Gilead hover over both Jack and Jack like the metaphorical storm cloud. Both his family, present and future, and anonymous passersby may never know or care to know anything more about him than how he looks or who he’s hurt. Because of this, Jack repeatedly attempts to detach from any meaningful involvement with his own life. Della calls him on this; to counter his “nihilism,” she cites Jesus as a reason to stay engaged (“A gentleman,” Jack says, “I am at considerable pains to avoid”). “I know how that sounded,” Della grants him:

I really just meant that there is—anyone, any human being, and then that person’s actual life, everything they didn’t mean or couldn’t say or wished for or grieved over. That’s reality. So someone who would know the world that way, some spirit, seems kind of inevitable. I think. Why should so much of reality, most of it, count for nothing? That’s how it seems to me. 

This is the all-knowing judge Jacks wants and fears and can’t believe in, someone who appreciates the full scope of his preoccupation with the gaping chasm between his intentions and his outcomes—the graceful and occasionally petty things he thinks and cherishes versus the shenanigans and occasional devastation that he manifests. Jack craves someone who knows that he isn’t a roving calamity-in-waiting, but how could anyone know this true nature when faced with the hard evidence of his life? Only by hearing his thoughts—or reading them.