Review: Anthony Domestico on Marilynne Robinson
Review: Anthony Domestico on Marilynne Robinson
I’ll begin with a confession: I had to stop teaching Marilynne Robinson after my students didn’t love Gilead as much as I thought they should. How could they not appreciate that novel’s balance of stylistic grace and philosophical rigor? How could they not laugh at its gentle comedy: characters who piously baptize kittens; a tale involving a horse, a hole in the road, and a jury-rigged shed? Harrumph, I said, and taught books toward which I felt more critical distance.
It’s no surprise then that I admired Robinson’s latest novel, Jack. It continues the story begun in Gilead (2004) and elaborated upon, from different angles and in different styles, in Home (2008) and Lila (2014). Those three novels, set in the 1950s, introduced readers to the fictional town of Gilead, Iowa, and a group of characters whose lives intertwine: John Ames, an elderly Congregationalist minister enamored of the world (“I love the prairie!” he typically exclaims); his younger wife Lila; their child Robby; that child’s namesake and Ames’s best friend, the Reverend Robert Boughton; and Glory, the youngest of Boughton’s eight children.
Then there’s Jack, Boughton’s beloved son. Jack frustrates and puzzles everyone he meets. He is a sticky-fingered drunk who acts with fastidious decorum; an unbeliever who believes in his own damnation; a proud man who has been humiliated by time in prison. Out of touch for years, he returns at the beginning of the Gilead novels—a return narrated from three perspectives in the first three novels. At home, Jack alternates between courtesy and self-destruction. He also reveals that, in St. Louis, he has fallen in love with Della, a Black woman with whom he has a son. In Missouri, their union is criminal.
Jack was introduced in Gilead as “the lost sheep, the lost coin. The prodigal son, not to put too fine a point on it.” Jack forces the problem of grace—how we respond to it, if we can; how we refuse it, as we do—upon himself and those he meets. As Robinson has written elsewhere, grace is “gratuitous”: “unexpected, unasked, unconditional.” Jack doesn’t believe he merits forgiveness; by earthly standards, maybe he doesn’t. He doesn’t believe that he deserves love, either. But the point of love, the point of grace, is that it’s undeserved.
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The new novel picks up before Gilead began, showing how Jack came to love Della—and, more mysteriously, how Della came to love Jack. The temporal layering is delicate. The novel starts with a terrible dinner date: Jack, fearing he’ll be roughed up by some goons to whom he owes money, escapes through the restaurant’s kitchen. Then, in a bravura section, Della and Jack are locked together overnight in an all-white cemetery in St. Louis, falling in love while talking about souls and sin, meaning and nothingness, poetry—Shakespeare, Milton, Paul Dunbar, William Carlos Williams—and more poetry. (Imagine an American My Night at Maud’s set graveside.)Robinson then circles back to their first meeting, when Della, a bishop’s daughter, mistook Jack for a clergyman. (So decorous is Jack that some strangers call him “Professor,” so louche that others call him “Slick.”)
Jack marvels and worries at Della’s love: “There were a thousand barriers between black Della and his indigent, disreputable self, and mere kindness could not lower any of them so much as an inch.” He “aspire[s] to utter harmlessness,” yet knows that he is opening himself up to social, even physical danger and Della to far worse. (As she wryly puts it, “I have never heard of a white man who got so little good out of being a white man.”) “Shame was a very old habit with him,” Robinson writes, as Jack remembers his past failures and imagines his future disgraces. Brilliant in many ways, the novel is most brilliant in its tracing Jack’s style of mind—“that endless, secret conversation that was himself.” For Robinson, the terms are interchangeable: consciousness is the self is the soul.
At novel’s end, Jack and Della are on a bus, heading toward a new life, Jack in the White section, Della in the Black. Echoing Adam and Eve’s entry into the world in Paradise Lost, Robinson writes, with balanced syntax, “They were together, after their fashion, and the world was all before them, such as it was.” If we’ve read Robinson’s earlier novels, we know where things are headed. The promise of Jack and Della’s union will be thwarted at every turn; Gilead, Iowa, a town with an abolitionist past, will not be paradise reclaimed; Jack will continue to sabotage himself and America will continue to sabotage any dream of racial redemption. In Home, an ailing Reverend Boughton watches the news with Jack: “On the screen white police with riot sticks were pushing and dragging black demonstrators. There were dogs.” Boughton cold-heartedly remarks, “There’s no reason to let that sort of trouble upset you. In six months nobody will remember one thing about it.” Jack can only respond, “Some people will probably remember it.”
Yet, at the end of Jack, these characters’ futures also seem radically, beautifully open. America’s endemic cruelties abide. So does Jack’s loyalty; so does Della’s bravery; so does the hope that history might bend toward love. Earlier, Jack remarks, “It’s not always clear to me how to tell grace from, you know, punishment.” Grace and punishment, freedom and predestination, history and possibility: these are the themes Robinson plays, and plays, to continued and exquisite effect.
Anthony Domestico is an associate professor of literature at Purchase College, SUNY, and the book critic for Commonweal. He is the author of Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period.
Book notes
We try to share with you the good news about the vital book local book cultures around the country, and especially today, fake though this nomenclature may sometimes feel, you can show them some love by giving them an early boost with some holiday business for “small business Saturday.” Take a cue from Larry Wilson and buy your holiday offerings from indie booksellers even when you aren’t buying books. Stumped? Buy gift cards! For example from our indie partner Malaprop’s in Ashville, NC (read more about their good works here).
Like we say, we try to bring the good news and not spend too much time complaining about the dangers lurking out there, but sometimes we can’t restrain ourselves. The BBC reported last week that US retail workers are “scared” as coronavirus cases surge in the US, with labor activists saying “big retailers like Amazon and Walmart must do more to protect workers as surging coronavirus cases coincide with the holiday shopping rush.” They are “calling for hazard pay, paid sick leave, and better communication about outbreaks.” Courtney Brown, an Amazon worker who picks out groceries in New Jersey, told the BBC that “right now it’s what we call the turkey apocalypse, where we are forced to just push out as much as we possibly can,” noting that HQ has been sending repeated notices in recent days about infected staff, pandemic hazard pay having expired in June.
In France, where Amazon warehouses were shut in April due to dangerous working conditions and the Finance Minister accused the company of putting “unacceptable” pressure on workers to show up, Amazon’s Black Friday promotion was actually cancelled in order to avoid unfair competition with locked-down small businesses. In Germany, Amazon’s second largest market after the US, a union urged workers to walk out on Prime Day. Coronavirus hazard pay there expired in May. Referring to Amazon’s sky-high earnings during the pandemic, as independent retail struggled on life support, Courtney Brown told the BBC, “they closed the corporate office until July 2021 because of the virus meanwhile we’re expected to keep risking our lives to pay for their big salaries.”
On another front, Vice reported on Monday that Amazon had hired the historically union-busting investigative firm Pinkerton to track worker and activist groups in Europe to “highlight potential risks/hazards that may impact Amazon operations.” Vice found evidence of intelligence-gathering by Amazon “risk analysts” across the Americas, the Middle East, Australia, and East Asia to monitor employee engagement with organizing groups and expressions of dissatisfaction with working conditions on social media. Vice cited an October letter from Leïla Chaibi, a member of European Parliament from France, co-signed by thirty-seven members of European Parliament, condemning interference by Amazon with worker organizing in Europe. In September, Amazon, after an outcry, removed two job postings for “intelligence analysts” to monitor labor organizing and other activism among employees.
The spying on labor groups may not be so surprising; more startling was the snooping around environmental activism. Vice uncovered internal surveillance on organizations like Extinction Rebellion, Greenpeace, and Greta Thunberg’s group Fridays for Future, noting that they were “increasing their influence especially on young people and students.” (Tweeted Fridays for Future: “Wow @amazon, are school children calling to protect the environment that much of a threat to you?”) But its environmental record may be as much of a vulnerability for Amazon as unionization. A year ago Amazon signed the Global Climate Pledge as 1,500 employees threatened to walk out in the impending Global Climate Strike. CEO Jeff Bezos committed $10 billion to an initiative named after himself to combat climate change last February a month after 350 Amazon employees signed an open letter condemning collaboration with oil and gas companies and climate-denying lobbying groups and the carbon footprint of the company’s proprietary delivery systems. The employees released a response to the new initiative accusing Bezos of trying to whitewash the company’s record. A UK group called Ethical Consumer has called for a boycott of Amazon for, among other things, its lack of transparency on toxic chemicals and conflict minerals. Greenpeace campaigner Elizabeth Jardin told Business Insider that Amazon “needs to end its machine-learning contracts with oil and gas companies and publish details of its overall energy demand and data center greenhouse gas emissions.” Shoppers also pointed to waste in Amazon’s packaging; demand for cardboard for home shipping had reshaped the American paper industry even before the pandemic.
By April, Amazon had fired one of the organizers of employees’ climate initiative, after threatening the group for violating a communications directive against criticizing the company publicly. The employee had tweeted in support of warehouse employees who were calling for safer working conditions; another employee who had shared her posts was fired as well, along with workers in Minnesota and Staten Island who had highlighted dangerous conditions.
As Washington Post book critic Ron Charles pointed out this week, the hand of Amazon can even be felt in the high-level mergers consolidating the publishing industry. Only by combining forces are publishers able to secure favorable terms from the all-embracing e-tailer that dwarfs them. The relationship between publishers and Amazon is an “extortionate and extortionary,” said Sally Hubbard of the Open Markets Institute, which has called on the Justice Department to challenge the pending sale of Simon and Schuster to Random House.
Time and again, as we’ve read about the pandemic response in our neighborhood bookstores, we see stories of employers putting staff and neighbors first. Of course nobody’s perfect, but with booksellers we are talking about businesses that depend on their communities and have chosen this life to be a positive force. So as you contemplate your holiday shopping, consider what you can do to sustain the country’s endangered retail sector, the workers who depend on it, and the benefits it brings. Here at the smallest of small businesses, we are working now on our own Book Post gift package, stay tuned!
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