November Retrospective
Jack by Marilynne Robinson
Jack is the fourth book in the series that began with Gilead and continued with Home and Lila. They are about, in various ways, two families who are tied together by the friendship of the two paterfamiliases John Ames and Robert Boughton who are both ministers in the small town of Gilead in Iowa. This particular story is all about the renegade, prodigal son of Reverend Boughton, Jack, and it takes place earlier in time that the first three entries, just after the close of the Second World War in St Louis, Missouri. Jack is a wayward man, a thief and a vagrant. He is intelligent and gifted but deeply insecure and oversensitive. And his peculiar mixture of strengths and weaknesses have rendered him incapable of living a normal life. In this entry, we hear about Jack’s relationship with a woman of colour, Della Miles. In an unlikely sequence of events, Jack and Della fall deeply in love with each other although they are beset by the deeply racist and inhumane se…
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