Hello friends,
It's week two of the book club, and I hope you are enjoying Jack! Reading it has made me eager to re-read other Robinson books that I haven't picked up in some time.
Norman shared in an email, "One impression I had of Jack (and Della to a lesser extent) was the freedom that comes from an awareness of one's imminent death or undoing. The scene next to the pond in the cemetery on the stoops of the cottage grotto is so vivid."
I love that section, too. There's so much to unpack—and some fascinating, beautiful lines. Jack notes, at one point, that to him, "Daylight was Purgatory. It was terrible, being a thing to be looked at." Jack loves to watch without being seen. But it seems that it's Della's gaze, throughout these and ensuing pages, that keeps exposing his soul and pulling him back toward the light.
I love, too, when Della tells Jack during this scene, "I just think there has to be a Jesus, to say 'beautiful' about things no one else would ever see. The precious things should be looked to, whatever becomes of the rest of it."
I've got more questions and essays for you to ponder below, if you so desire, primarily focused on pages 80-160.
Feel free to share the webinar registration page with others you think might be interested!
Hope you have a lovely week,
Gracy
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essays & questions
Charlie Clark, one of our webinar panelists, has written a fantastic review of Jack for Fare Forward, and I highly recommend it. He compares Jack to Robinson's first novel, Housekeeping, which similarly considers ideas of home and belonging alongside characters who feel like outcasts—who embrace transience, entropy, and death. In Housekeeping, Ruth's Aunt Sylvie teaches her "to walk under water." Jack, Charlie says, "seems to have been born underwater."
"It’s remarkable how little the Mississippi figures in the novel ('the brown god is almost forgotten')," Charlie writes. "But then, there is nothing riverine about Jack Boughton, nothing coursing; he is indeed a lake creature (a 'lack' creature). ... Jack’s subaquatic life suggests some fall from grace. Robinson takes her text from Paradise Lost. 'The Prince of Darkness, the Prince of Absence,' Jack calls himself, and here, as in Gilead and Home, he questions the possibility of his own reprobation. It seems to everyone, Jack included, that he was somehow born on the wrong side of light and life."
- Throughout these pages, we learn how Della and Jack meet, and watch their relationship unfold. We see Jack through his own eyes—but we also catch glimpses of Della's perception of Jack, and observe her persistent offerings of hospitality. Why do you think Della offers Jack kindness, even when she barely knows him (but knows him enough to recognize his "shady" nature)?
- Do you think Jack is as hapless and/or lost as he perceives himself to be? Why, or why not?
- It's interesting to contrast Jack's listlessness with Della's passion—but it's also true that both are mysterious, "veiled" in many of their thoughts and actions. Jack seems to think of Della as another "fragile" creature he might harm or break; her actions suggest that she doesn't agree. What do you think?
Jack is a figure of Adam, Charlie writes, alone in a garden. He meets a woman, "and the woman is very good." But "here again, all our categories are turned over and over as roles reverse themselves," Charlie suggests. "In Gilead and Home, Della is Jack’s redeemer.... [But] Jack forces us to remember that she is his victim. Back in Iowa, did we ever ask what she gave up to save him? Jack is not so much Della’s Adam as her Eve: drawing his beloved down into life underwater. He is her Fall."
- Della's love for Jack is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer refers to as a "costly grace." How do you see those costs begin to unfold in these pages? What does Della teach us about the work involved in offering grace?
This section also considers Jack's relationship with his father: the trouble and pain, goodness and love all interlaced in that relationship. In a Los Angeles Review of Books essay on Robinson's work, Albert Wu and Michelle Kuo note that "Jack is the 'one son whom [his father] has never known, whom he has favored as one does a wound.'"
- Della suggests at one point that Jack has given up on life—but keeps on living, rather passively, for his father's sake. How does this father-son relationship define Jack? What do you think is at the root of Jack's struggle to return home, to be the prodigal who comes back to his father?
Wu and Kuo argue that the heart of Robinson's fiction is rooted in "the sense of hungering to excavate the essence of humanity, the fundamental question of being in the world." I love this quote, and will finish with it, as it serves as an excellent distillation of the challenge and beauty presented to the reader in Jack:
"This metaphysical hunger is what makes Robinson’s fiction so satisfying. We see characters struggling to make sense of what it means to exist — struggling to understand, struggling to comprehend, struggling to act morally. Above all, her fiction is an invitation to us: struggle alongside these characters, she seems to say; and in struggling you may yourself shine light into them, recognizing their desire to be more than what they are."
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I grew up in rural Idaho, and now live in Northern Virginia. I have written for The American Conservative, The Week, New York Times, Washington Post, National Review, Weekly Standard, Christianity Today, and others. To quote C.S. Lewis, "You'll never find a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me."
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