Jack - A book review

 

Jack by Marilynne Robinson

Jack a ne’er do well white guy and Della a respectable black school teacher fall in love. Her family are very respectable Christians and her father is a Methodist Bishop. Jack is estranged from his father a Presbyterian minister.

The couple share their thinking about sin and guilt, marriage and family, race and religion, poetry and prose and life in segregated St. Louis and Memphis in the 1920s.

Their forbidden love produces a pregnancy. The black family has long struggled to be honourable and respectable. They knew they were educated, strong and dignified. They were proud  to be black. They chose to be separated from white society and kept to themselves, as did the Jews, Italians and Germans who came to this country.

Jack and Della’s relationship threatened their way of life. The book ends with the pregnant couple venturing out on their own.

This a marvellous book with long dialogues between the couple and also with a Baptist minister’s input into Jack’s life. The scenes shift between the two cities and in the homes of the coloured families. Robinson’s command of narrative, descriptions of places and conversations is masterful. We are shown powerful black families, a struggling white man and the disgrace of racial prejudice.

RWC