Jack
Marilynne Robinson
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Jack
Marilynne Robinson
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
From the outset Robinson reveals her subtle mastery of both character and language.
... with the sublime Jack, she resumes and deepens her quest, extending it to the contemplation of race.
The novel doesn’t quite live up to the high standards set by its predecessors. The dialogue is burdened with too much of the philosophical and theological debate.
This is the era of Jim Crow and strictly enforced miscegenation laws, a milieu Robinson evokes with small, deft strokes.
... particularly dependent on those previous books. If you’re tempted to read them out of order, be warned...Jack rests on what came before, and its poignancy arises from what we know lies ahead for these characters.
Anyone who has read these radiant novels, I think, will be interested in reading Jack Boughton’s own narrative, and seeing how and why he has changed.
The book is a particularly welcome arrival in this time of upheaval: It's as quietly thoughtful, human, and heartrending as Robinson’s earlier work, while illuminating the blatant racial injustices of a not-so-distant era..
I’ve sometimes wondered whether Robinson originally intended to set her series in the 19th century — a time when emancipated people set up free communities, giving Iowa a substantial Black population. It’s always seemed to me that Robinson’s heart is there — in the era when the Great Awakening inspired a prophetic, utopian Christianity — rather than in the rigid 1950s, when these Black communities had disappeared and white rural churches promoted lock-step patriotism and anti-communism, not introspection and spiritual unease.
This is not a book that has been designed to please. Its pace is deliberately slow, and character is sometimes overwhelmed by a weight of significance that verges on the allegorical.
Jack is not a novel that offers answers to the urgent moral question of American racism. Nor should it.
Robinson lets us feel every delicate, evanescent, seemingly impossible minute of it.
In its simplest sense, Jack is about salvation, though of a more earthly kind than that theorized by the Gilead elders. Even so, the obstacles are as daunting as any pilgrim’s progress.
[Jack] lives in a mostly miserable haze, which in turn gives the book a hazy quality, ungrounded and restless.
Jack is suffused with the virtues that make Robinson one of our greatest thinkers on matters of spirituality, love, and family. Thoughtful, subtle, probing, it glows with wit and wisdom. But, against its siblings in the series, it casts a cloudier light, with fewer flashes to bring tears to the eyes or an exclamation to the lips. That is in part due to the fact that Jack relies much more heavily on dialogue, which hurries Robinson’s prose from its typical patient unfolding. But it’s mostly due to its titular character.
...should stir a host of emotions.
Jack Boughton is probably the most interesting character in the fictional world of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead novels.
Like all of Robinson’s Gilead novels, Jack is a novel about goodness and godliness, and about how America’s great and small cruelties obstruct them.
The writing is starkly memorable and chilling because of Robinson’s magisterial approach to character and destiny, to sinfulness and the possibility of redemption, but also because of her skill at delineating minute feelings and ordinary, small gestures.
Jack, the latest novel from Robinson, has ample pleasures, rarely separable from the potent spiritual and existential concepts and stirring emotions conjured by her narrative. Jack achieves something of a singular beauty.
Despite the novel’s title, it is surprising to find that Jack is its only real character. Della, present nearly throughout the story, sadly lacks any actual presence. At times, she is the philosophical mouthpiece of her author.
Reading Jack at this turbulent moment in national and world events, particularly this juncture in the continuing struggle for racial equity and justice, is like taking a deep drink of cool water.
In a way similar to teaching, writing—fiction and poetry especially—is offered up, offered beyond the limit of any moral doctrine and any community, beyond any name. For this impossible, defenseless gesture of writers and teachers, Jack makes a lasting refuge..
... 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, 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.
The relationship is beautifully developed, and Robinson carefully unpacks the particular struggles of interracial relationships in mid 20th century America, but she stops short of confronting the very real threat of physical violence that would have challenged them both, especially Della. For the most part, the threats in this novel remain theoretical; uttered, but benign.
Her plots are simple and the voices of her characters both indelible and compelling.
It’s no surprise then that I admired Robinson’s latest novel, Jack. It continues the story begun in Gilead and elaborated upon, from different angles and in different styles, in Home and Lila.
... it is difficult to imagine any other contemporary writer who could achieve so improbable a conflation of doctrine and feeling.
As is her habit, Robinson keeps going over the emotional ground, edging backward and forward in time, in slow scenes with many passages of repetitive, inconclusive dialogue.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Marilynne Robinson’s beautiful, profound novel Jackwill not be for every reader.
Robinson shows the dynamics of privilege: alone on the street, Jack’s shabbiness leads both Black and white people to mistake him for a beggar. For Della, meanwhile, clothing offers transformation on a painfully limited scale.
... [a] glorious work of metaphysical and moral inquiry, nuanced feelings, intricate imagination, and exquisite sensuousness.
The mixed results suggest Ms. Robinson should have stuck to her inclination.
... it is that the same thoughts recur on a loop for 300 pages, virtually all of which contain at least one sentence that sounds like a Marilynne Robinson parody.
A sometimes tender, sometimes fraught story of interracial love in a time of trouble.
... stellar, revelatory.