Jack can be read as a stand-alone, but the book gains much from what many readers will bring to it of their knowledge of its central character from his appearances in the trilogy of novels that preceded this one. Robinson is aiming at something more timeless and considered than the schlocky love-in-the-time-of-Jim-Crow that could be made out of these materials. But like in Romeo and Juliet’s Verona, our lovers are one overheard remark, one observed kiss away from tragedy. The setting, St Louis, Missouri, where the American Midwest starts to turn into the south, has charm aplenty. The principals are charismatic, their conversation sparky.
Marilynne Robinson’s novel has some of the beats of a romantic comedy. But we are in the early 1950s, and this revelation only gets him thrown out of his lodgings and threatened with the police. Or so Jack at one point tries to tell his landlady, to persuade her she should try seeing beyond the fact that Della is “a colored lady”.
She’s a minister’s daughter, an English teacher.”
Della, with whom he is in love, is “a wonderful, gentle woman. The Jack of the title is, by his own account, a “confirmed, inveterate bum”, the now-faithless son of a Presbyterian minister from Iowa whose life has gone very wrong.
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