Jack, by Marilynne Robinson, is like all of her books, an absolute treasure.

The story centers around Jack, the son of Rev. Boughton in the previous Gilead books. It is also sweet love story. It’s hard to explain the immersive nature of Robinson’s novels, but “Jack” is a perfect finish.

Thank you to Netgalley and Marilynne Robinson for a copy of Jack (Gilead) for an honest review. Jack is last story in the Gilead series. I haven’t read any of the other books and followed along well to Jack. This is a beautiful love story between two broken people, in Gilead Iowa. Jack( a white man) with a drinking problem and down on his luck meets Della (an African American woman) school teacher with her career and life in lone. Once they meet, life gets turned upside down. An international relationship was frowned upon. Even with the obstacles, the find themselves in love. They are forced to make decisions that will affect this relationship. They aren’t going to get support and they persevere.. This story was written so well. I was intrigued by Jack and Della from the start. The characters are so well developed and their weaknesses made me like them even more. I am so glad I had the chance to read Jack. This was a 5 star read for me. I have recommended it to friends and family. I will probably read the first 3 books in the series. I loved the writing so much. See my reviews on Amazon and Barnes & Nobles as well.

Another addition to the Gilead novels, which I love. This was no different. I loved going back to that world and getting lost in Robinson's beautiful prose. It was very moving and fantastic.
Thanks a lot to NG and the publisher for this copy.

If you are a fan of Marilynne Robinson's Gilead series, you already know who Jack is. Chances are, you already know his story too. Jack is the enigmatic ne'er do well who disrupts the peace of Gilead's quiet narrator, Rev. John Ames, with his return to town after a 20-year absence. In that first novel of the series, we learn that though he is the beloved (perhaps most beloved) son of the narrator's friend and fellow cleric, Jack has done nothing but bring shame to his family with his childhood stream of malicious pranks, petty larcenies and deliberate provocations. The novel Jack traverses the intervening years between his departure and return to Gilead, painting a portrait of an infinitely flawed and complicated man grappling with what it means to truly love.

If Robinson has written beautifully about family life and the domestic love that exists between father and son in Gilead, she proves equal to the task of probing romantic love in Jack. As is the case with her other works, Jack begins slowly and with such ordinary detail that an impatient reader might not make it very far. The novel opens in the early 1950s with Jack, who is white, and Della, a young Black woman, walking through a graveyard over the course of a night. They discuss life and art and what it might mean to start over in a world without rules and restrictions. At times, it's difficult to know where Robinson is taking us with this extended dialogue. However, there are rewards for the reader's patience. As Jack and Della's love story unfolds, those ordinary details (the basics of which readers of Gilead and its successor Home already know) layer in upon one another, creating a prism for the mysteries of love, such as how and why two particular people fall for one another. For Della, the reason is simple. She says:

But once in a lifetime, maybe, you look at a stranger and you see a soul, a glorious presence out of place in the world. And if you love God, every choice is made for you. There is no turning away. You've seen the mystery—you've seen what life is about. What it's for. And a soul has no earthly qualities, no history among the things of this world, no guilt or injury or failure. No more than a flame would have. There is nothing to be said about it except that it is a holy human soul. And it is a miracle when you recognize it.

For Jack, the answer is much more complicated. His story of falling in love with Della seems tied to every other (failed) love story in his life and his continual striving to leave "fragile things" undamaged. When Jack sees Della for the first time he is just out of prison, dressed in a suit that makes him look like his preacher father, and on his way to his mother's funeral. In this moment, Jack chooses to step into Della's mistaken impression that he is a preacher himself, rather than to deal with the difficult emotions that have come with his years of disappointment and thwarted promise. This is not to say, however, that Jack doesn't truly love Della. While some might interpret his relationship with Della and his inability to leave her alone despite the dangers of being an interracial couple as part of his normal, destructive compulsion, others might see their relationship as a final resolution to his ongoing question of faith and his long-standing rejection of unconditional love. When Jack finds Della in his room, he thinks, "…there she was, quietly asleep, blessing his shabby bedclothes with her peacefulness, her soft breathing. Blessing the whole barren room with her amazing trust. There was dread, yes, but grace, too."

And Della is indeed a blessing. One of the most compelling aspects of the novel is how equally yoked, insofar as the times allowed, Della is to the singular Jack. In many ways, she is a reflection of him. Like Jack, she is the child of a minister, and because of her innate intelligence, she is a symbol of hope for her family. Della is also deeply unsatisfied with the world as it exists. As a child she is brought to tears by the notion that she, because of her skin color, will not be able to safely visit Wyoming, a place of wild freedom in her imagination. This innate dissatisfaction with the world later makes her the perfect "conspirator" with Jack as she also actively pursues a relationship that will most likely get her fired or thrown in jail. Della is the one who declares them "married," and in the aftermath she holds Jack's hand and says, "You're not doomed. Neither am I. We've chosen a difficult life, that's all."

Despite the deep connections to the other books in the Gilead series, readers don't need to have read any of them to appreciate Jack. They can lose themselves in Robinson's beautiful language and boundless empathy for her characters just as easily. However, if readers are returning to the world of Gilead, they will find that Jack, and his actions, remain the axis upon which so much of the emotional weight of this world spins.

This is an odd but hardly unwelcome volume in the Gilead (now) quartet. It's about Jack, Reverend Boughton's ne'er do well son who sort of haunts the pages of the prior novels, slinking in and out of the periphery of the narrative. Neither Reverend Boughton nor Ames appear. This is both an empathetic character study and romance, featuring Jack's black wife, Della Miles. There is a difference in Robinson's prose; her setting of bustling St. Louis and not-so-godly (superficially, at least) Jack allows her to adjust her pacing and subject matter, while maintaining its grace and clarity. The conversation pieces are probably my favorite of all four Gilead novels I have read - in place of the charming, difficult, and meandering struggles of Reverend Ames, Glory, and Lila (and not to speak of them as if they are interchangeable - hardly), are two equals in mind and spirit. Though Jack analyzes his actions and future words like he is preparing for a presidential debate, he is still guided through life by an impulse to destroy things. It makes for an intimately interior reading experience. Sometimes finding a character to root for isn't disappointing.

Well, this was a bust.

I tried, I really did, but it was off with its head at the halfway mark. It had all the good stuff—it’s well written and an excellent character study, with plenty of psychological insight. No waxing poetic about tree stumps and caterpillars, yay! And the main character is self-effacing, always a draw for me. The only interesting part is that it’s a love story between a white man (bum) and a black woman (teacher), and this takes place in the Midwest in the 1950s, where prejudice thrives. This adds a miniscule amount of tension, and I felt sad that they had to hide their affection. But none of that worked because this book was BOR—ING! I have no desire to pull out these good parts and stick them in an in-your-face Joy Jar. I’ll show them (LOL)! They deserve only a short paragraph, not a long list. It’s straight to the gripes.

Complaint Board

-The story begins with an interminably long conversation between the man and woman in a cemetery. Will we ever get out? We’re stuck there the whole night because the gates are locked. This scene takes up a quarter of the book. Way too long! I was claustrophobic and was worried that the whole story would be in the graveyard.

-We started off on the wrong foot because the graveyard chat included discussions of faith, God, and philosophy. Both characters had preacher dads, so that explains it. I always run for the hills when there’s church talk, and philosophical chats often remind me of pretentious and boring college lectures. My eyes were glazing over.

-The guy puts himself down constantly and is a criminal and a cad. I mean he never stops! He is so disgusted with himself, I couldn’t help but join in. Usually I love it that a character knows his faults; here it’s overkill.

-I can’t for the life of me figure out what the woman sees in him. I believe him when he says he’s awful. Why doesn’t she? Half the time he’s dirty and disheveled, sometimes sleeping off booze on a park bench.

-We never get to see any of it through the woman’s eyes, so it’s so one-sided. I wanted to hear her take.

-It’s all first-person narrative from the guy. Introspection to the nth degree, which I usually love but I didn’t here. Let me out of his head, please! My old head just kept finding other things to think about, and I had no control over its wanderings. Don’t I need to unload the dishwasher? And off I’d go, leaving the book all alone on the table, rejected.

I was all squirmy wormy about DNFing this. Some uptight, upright voice kept telling me I had to finish the book, that I was a failure if I gave up on it. But it was torture, pure torture, every single time I picked the book up, and I noticed I avoided reading even though I was seriously due for a book fix. I don’t know why I do this to myself! A reasonable and gentle voice kept telling me I had to ditch it, and finally I listened to her. Life is too short, my To-Be-Read pile too bulgy. Once I finally gave myself permission to abandon the book, ah, ah, ah, such a great relief! My heart, soul, head, and eyes were ready for a new book and I got all smiley again in anticipation.

Check out other reviews; most people liked this one.

Thanks to NetGalley for the advance copy.

The world can make you feel so small, the very least among society, humanity. And it is just then that the Lord is with you, loving you, saying, "I know your heart just as well as I know my own! Stranger, prisoner, I know your heart".

This is not only a love story in a time in history when it was illegal to be married as a biracial couple, but it is how we are made prisoner of our own thoughts. Jack is the main protagonist. He develops a relationship with Della that he is strongly drawn too. Maybe its because it something or someone he can't have or she draws something out of him that he never knew he was capable of. There is a lot of deep reflection in Jack that draws the reader to reflect on themselves and circumstances and ultimately to God. How we view others in a complicated world that is cursed. The narration follows Jack has he comptemplates his goodness and worthiness while Della helps him find the ultimate grace. The grace to receive love before you can give love.

A special thank you to Farrar and Netgalley for the ARC and the opportunity to post an honest review

A delightfully slow love story set in St. Louis sometime in the post-war 40s or early 50s. You root for it to work out, but worry that it won’t given that the man is white and the woman black at a time when even cohabitation is illegal in Missouri and many other states. The beauty is in how the tale is told and Robison’s skill in character development and engaging a reader’s fascination with the unfolding relationship and its fate.

In tone and setting, this novel is very much in keeping with her series of connected novels about the rural residents of the fictional Gilead, Iowa, which I have enjoyed a lot. A shortlist of what I appreciate from her writing is her success at harnessing minimalism to create a human microscosm in a small community, her elegance in portraying character development, rich dialog, effective embedding of the story into a realistic community, empathetic exploration of internal states and emotions, and recurring focus on spirituality. With her last one, Lila, I appreciated the subtle humor of an unlikely love affair between a minister and a tough, uneducated woman who was raised in an orphanage and, as an emblem of her tough-knocks life, carries a knife. A scene that stands out or me is their first chance meeting on a village path in which subtle flirting emerges while discussing her bucket of fish. The first encounter in this one, where the strangers spend a rainy night in a cemetery after getting locked in after closing time, is also comparably odd, comic, and a gamble in terms of likely success in the relationship. In this case, the male lead, Jack Broughton has the disreputable history and the woman, Della Miles, , is a respectable school teacher from a religious middle class family from Tennessee.

Jack is the loner son of Presbyterian minister in Gilead who dropped out of college and lives off of a monthly allowance from his brother, minor thefts, and odd jobs . We don’t learn why he has such low ambition or why he needs to check out so often using alcohol until later, but we can identify with the overriding goal in his thoughts to do no harm to anyone. Della warms to his playful and courteous attentions and basks in their common interests in poetry, Shakespeare, gospel music, and concern over the growing nihilism in the world. Such a wonderful narrative of the courageous steps to develop trust across so many obvious barriers, including the universal challenge of revealing the best of oneself without hiding too much of one’s mistakes or dark secrets. All of us every day must face the risk of harm to loved ones by not fulfilling expectations, but only rarely such as extreme barrier Jack and Della here face from the racist morality of her family and community. Despite being an atheist, Jack finds a significant sounding board for his choices from the minister of a black Methodist church and also an unlikely ally among Della’s large extended family.

To show her lean, effective prose a work, here are quotes from Della and Jack on their long night at the graveyard and a thought of Jack’s that epitomizes his cautious approach.

Della: "It just seems to me something as though—if we were the only ones left after the world ended, and we made the rules—they might work just as well--" …

Jack: "Let me guess. Your father’s favorite daughter is wandering the night with a disreputable white man. Barefoot, In a cemetery. If she’s caught at it, the scandal will echo down the ages, into the furthest reaches of Tennessee, all its strange particulars scrutinized. Forever. And he was so proud of you." …

Jack’s mind: 'He didn’t hold her hand a second longer than he should have.'

The return to Gilead! 

We know Jack, but JackI (the book) brings new insight and a new exploration of the understanding of self, of family, of faith. Even as a flawed character, we love and feel for him.

It is surprisingly timely in our current climate, exploring the relationship between Jack and Della back in 1948 and what it means to be an interracial couple. Remember, this is pre- Loving v. Virginia.

Robinson's writing is beautiful and always such a joy to read.

I had great expectations for “Jack,” the fourth novel in Marilynne Robinson’s “Gilead” series, as I love Robinson’s beautiful prose and had been intrigued by the fleeting glimpses of the charming ne’er-do-well Jack Boughton in the previous books in the series. But Jack seems almost a rueful spectator in his eponymous book, a dour and broken figure, lamenting his past actions and his present circumstances but seemingly unable to change. Until, that is, he happens upon Della Miles stranded in the rain, offers her his umbrella, and promptly falls in love. As with everything in Jack’s world, however, the path to happiness will not be an easy one, since this is segregated post WWII America—and Della is black. Over the course of a subsequent night spent accidentally stuck together in a locked whites-only cemetery, during which the pair discuss poetry, Shakespeare and their mutual status as children of ministers, Della begins to fall for Jack as well, and they embark on a star-crossed romance.

Which is precisely where I began to have problems with “Jack.” Della tells Jack earlier in the book that her job as a teacher in a prestigious St. Louis school means everything to her—that she fought her close-knit family for the opportunity to leave Memphis and pursue this dream. It was difficult for me to believe, then, that a shared love of poetry would be enough to compel Della to risk everything she has—to risk family disgrace and even incarceration—for a relationship with a man who is constantly telling her that he is a worthless cad. (Which he does over and over...and over.) And, since I read the earlier “Gilead” books and therefore know what happens later in the relationship, it was difficult to see Jack continually vow to walk away from Della for her own good, only to capitulate repeatedly—it’s like helplessly watching a car crash unfold in slow motion. Robinson’s prose is still gorgeous—as when she writes, “Night to morning turned like an hourglass, darkness defined arbitrarily”—and there are certainly flashes of the charming Jack that I was expecting, both of which make “Jack” a more than worthwhile read. But in the end I, unlike Della, just couldn’t fall head over heels for either Jack or his novel.

Thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for providing me with an ARC of this title in return for my honest review.

arilynne Robinson’s Gilead books are astounding works of compassionate literature. I love each of them, with Gilead and Lila standing just ahead of Home for me personally. Jack, which with its recent publication makes this series a quartet, is right up there with Gilead for me. It’s a beautifully complex look at love and meaningfulness in life, and whether such things can retrieve and heal a lost soul.

The titular character, Jack Boughton, was a principle character in 2004’s Gilead. In that contemporary classic, Jack returns to his home in Gilead, Iowa, and threatens to unwind the elderly, distrusting narrator, John Ames. Ames is a Protestant minister and must work through his feelings of contempt for this errant son of a valued friend, the fellow minister, Rev. Robert Boughton.

In Jack we go backwards in time, to before Jack returns to Gilead. He is a wanderer in St. Louis, looking for work that will cover his boarding, if he can find boarding. He’s rough on the outside — his clothing is ragged, his body is skinny, and his face and hands are evidence of prior skirmishes — and he hasn’t got much positive going on inside. As a young man he disappointed his family time and again with things like petty thievery. Uncomfortable in Gilead — and seeking to escape some other personal problems — Jack left and spent the next several years in and out of jail.

In Jack, we meet a man who feels worthless. He does not understand his propensity to harm others, though he hopes he’s doing it less and less:

There were times in his youth when his imaginations of destruction were so powerful that the deed itself seemed as bad as done. So he did it. It was as if the force of the idea were strong enough that his collaboration in it was trivial. These impulses — they were not temptations — had quieted over the years.
Not only does he remain on the outskirts of society because he doesn’t feel he belongs in society, but he also doesn’t want to be in a position to harm others anymore. He sees others like him, even if they are not and never will be friends:

He and the clerk were alike in that neither of them mattered at all. Absent either of them, no one would look at the universe and say, Very nice, only one thing missing.
But in the first pages of the novel, we see that Jack has met a young woman named Della. Our first gimpse of them does not suggest a blossoming relationship:

He was walking along almost beside her, two steps behind. She did not look back. She said, “I’m not talking to you.”

“I completely understand.”

“If you did completely understand, you wouldn’t be following me.”

He said, “When a fellow takes a girl out to dinner, he has to see her home.”

“No, he doesn’t have to. Not if she tells him to go away and leave her alone.”

“I can’t help the way I was brought up,” he said. But he crossed the street and walked along beside her, across the street. When they were a block away from where she lived, he came across the street again. He said, “I do want to apologize.”

“I don’t want to hear it. And don’t bother trying to explain.”

“Thank you. I mean I’d rather not try to explain. If that’s all right.”

“Nothing is all right. All right has no place in this conversation.” Still, her voice was soft.
Della and Jack were never meant to be together. Della is a schoolteacher who comes from a respectable family. Jack does not fit in there. But that’s not all. If you’ve read Gilead you know that Della is a black woman, and both blacks and whites in St. Louis find even the suggestion of their relationship dangerous. She doesn’t deserve the trouble Jack will bring her, many advise. Both Jack and Della agree, but they have come together regardless.

This is a fundamental issue in Jack, but it is not where the book shines through for me. Robinson shows us how this relationship develops over time, the attraction and the wariness, the bliss and the very real peril. There’s also all of the moments when Jack knows he is being selfish and presumptuous: “He had to get her out of here, back to the right kind of life, in which he would of course have no place at all.”

Jack even seeks help from a well-meaning black minister, but he hears the same thing:

The minister leaned back in his chair. “Mr. Boughton, I will be very frank with you. I think I understand what I’m asking you to give up. You strike me as an intensely lonely man, someone for whom life has not gone well. And suddenly a fine young woman has decided she is in love with you. Her life up to this point has been sheltered enough that she doesn’t really know the kinds of things that can happen when laws are violated. And what can you do for her? You can be loyal to her. That’s worse that useless in the circumstances, unless you decide the loyal thing would be to leave her alone.”
It’s a major struggle. Della is having it as well. She loves her family and knows that her relationship with a white man would likely be ruinous, and not because they’d disown her. They love her terrible: that’s part of the problem. They want her happiness, but honestly even we recognize how unsuitable Jack is. We have the benefit, though, of also seeing Jack’s internal struggle, his own fight for meaning, to be someone worth loving.

Love, in so many forms, and well-wishing are sources of constant tension in this book. But it’s also the book’s beautiful light. It’s what helps the characters transcend the boundaries society would place on them. This shows up in several of Jack’s relationships. His father, for example, loves him a great deal. We’ve seen this in Gilead and Home, where others suggested do better to just forsake his son. But he wouldn’t do it, and this became a source of peace and pain for Jack:

He heard his mother say once, “I guess you’re never going to give up on him.” His father seemed to consider, and then he said, “I’m just not sure there would be any point in it.”
It’s not that easy for his father, of course. He has had to continually reconcile his belief in justice and doctrine that suggested his son was lost with his strong belief in grace and mercy, as well as his own certainty that he loved his son.

The relationship between Jack and Della, we know, will not proceed easily. We worry about Jack’s impulses and wonder what Della is getting out of this. Jack wonders too:

So here I am, he thought. And here she was, Della, the woman he had recruited into his daydreams to make up for the paucity of meaning and event he sometimes found oppressive.
It’s because he wonders that we get a glimpse at what Della sees in him when she sees past all of the scruff and circumstance.

It’s a tremendous book in a tremendous series of books that continues to affect my life deeply.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to read this book.
I tried very hard to like this book because I loved the other books in the series. After three valiant attempts to get through the book, I have decided to stop trying. I'm required to rate the book here on Net Galley, but since I didn't finish it, I won't rate it or say anything about it on Good Reads.

I I thought I might be alone in this and that maybe it was just me being too hard on author but then I read a few other members’ comments and realized, it’s not just me!
I couldn’t finish reading this book because I couldn’t bear to continue reading about hi a novel black woman falling for an irredeemable white man. I’m feeling sensitive to black characters playing props to white characters and within the first fifty pages, I felt that this book had fallen to this trope. Maybe if I made it through the whole book I wouldn’t feel this way but I just couldn’t do it.

"Jack" is a prequel to the Gilead series. Even so, I’m glad that I read all the previous books first. Those other three novels provide a needed background to Jack and his relationship with his father and siblings.

All-in-all, I found this a difficult book to read. At times it is slow and repetitive. It is told from Jack’s POV in a stream-of-consciousness narrative. It does not flow in a straight timeline which I sometimes found confusing. For example, the novel opens with Jack apologizing to Della about something. It is only later that we learn what happened and why he felt the need to apologize. I found the non-linear narrative combined with Jack’s constant self-talk frustrating at times.

I had hoped to learn a bit more about Jack and Della’s relationship as it appears in "Home." However, this novel ends about ten years before the beginning of "Home," resulting in gaps in their relationship that I had hoped would be clarified in "Jack." Of the four books in this series, I think I liked this one the least.

Jack, the fourth and newest novel in Robinson's Gilead series, may be newest in publication but not in chronology. That means longtime readers already have a good idea of how Jack and Della's story ends, which makes for a piercing reading experience. Sad and gentle, heartbreaking and beautiful

I have not read the previous books in this series and that may have put me at a disadvantage. Marilynne Robinson's reputation is for beautiful, careful prose and consideration of deep spiritual questions about the human condition. This book also takes on serious issues such as interracial love post World War II when it was illegal and dangerous, and the appreciation of an educated woman for an itinerant, minimally educated man who supports himself through petty theft. Regular binges on alcohol and time in prison don't help the situation. There is tender love between the two and Robinson expresses this in her carefully crafted prose. But...and here comes my regretted problem with the book...I kept feeling that I was "watching" a play that was too wordy and too stagnant. I kept waiting for the story to begin a dramatic arc, and if there was one I missed it. In the first couple of chapters especially, I more than once thought, "Who on earth TALKS like this?!" Jack endlessly apologizes, Della parries, and they have these endless little duels about not very much. The dialogue felt stilted and old-fashioned to me, as if the couple were talking about talking. Please take this review with a grain of salt: if you have read the previous Gilead books, this may fit in with the others beautifully in terms of pacing and theme.

Marilynne Robinson is a gift for readers. Her luminous novels have provided touchstones for those whose faith is stirred, challenged, and strengthened as they read. In her latest, telling this time the captivating story of Jack Boughton, she guides us through the interracial relationship of Jack and Della in a time when such a relationship faced incredible challenges. Jack is challenging enough to deal with, but we certainly understand his attraction to Della. This continues the rich, deep tale begun in Gilead in wonderful fashion.

I have to admit that I was disappointed in this book, having long been a fan of Marilynne Robinson. I was glad to read it and get a feeling of finishing the Gilead story, but I think the book would only be of interest to those who are diehard Robinson fans and have read the rest of the series.

Jack is definitely a character that I will remember for quite sometime. I have not read anything from this author in the past, but find that work to resonate strongly for the time period it was based in and today as well. I think sometimes that thoughts were excessive and I could not always follow where they were leading. I loved the utter complexity though and the passion and feel for life in the main character. I would have loved to see what Della's thought processes were after I become so well versed on what made Jack tick. Thanks for the ARC, NetGalley. I want more from this author and will be seeking it out.

Jack is the fourth in a quartet of books set in Gilead, Iowa. Though it stands alone, I really feel that readers would be better served by reading the novels in order. That being said, the Gilead series is a lovely family saga of life in small town religious families after World War Two. Jack is the black sheep of Ms Robinson's Boughton family, a very complex and layered character. His love, Della, is less complex but nonetheless captivating as a character. I appreciated their discussions on social mores and life. I particularly was taken by segments of Jack's internal dialogue. I recommend the series and this installment - star crossed lovers written gently and well. 3.5
I received my copy through NetGalley under no obligation.