I have fallen in love with Marilynne Robinson through Gilead. The story and the writing just penetrated me and settled in my inner organs as some sort of a holy spirit. It felt like a balm enveloping me from the inside. Maybe Robinson would call this Grace, her omnipresent theme that every story and character is plunged in. My experience and reaction was such that I tried to save up the other books from this now tetralogy as I wanted to make sure I always have one available unread since I did not know whether any more would be forthcoming. And so it happened that I read Gilead and Home and had Lila on the shelf for years and then Jack came out...

I had been pre-warned by my good friend who first introduced me to Robinson that Jack is a rather bleak story and not as engaging and smooth-flowing as the other ones. Nevertheless, I am unable to discern how much of my appreciation of it has been shaped by my extremely high-expectations or the foreknowledge of the book’s weaknesses. 

I dived in. Jack was familiar from the previous books, he took quite a distinctive yet unclear shape in Home and he remained ambiguous to me throughout this novel. He is both likeable and repulsive. We cheer for him and judge him at the same time. We shake our head, shed a tear and wash our hands of him in quick succession. How wonderfully multifaceted and thus a very representative human being. Della offers a picture of gentle, subtle  and inadvertent perfection.  She is not striving to be a certain way, she cannot help it, which is what she shares with Jack who, however, tries to extricate himself from himself. In a way they present a contrast of innate perfection and absolute wholesomeness and inescapably intrinsic imperfection and fragmentariness as if Jack’s humanity had been shattered into many pieces and as he picks one lost shard up he seems to drop another one and so continues forever. 

I have to admit that I struggled with the timeline that went back and forth without any verbal or visual clues and at one point I got completely lost, unable to extricate myself. I did not know that getting lost in a story could give me anxiety but it did and I went through momentary panic and laboured breathing. I also left the book untouched for two weeks. Having spoken about it to my friend from the second paragraph he remembered the same struggle but was unsure whether he resolved the lapse in the timeline or not. I had to convince myself that I found and tied the thread to be able to continue but please, do not probe it.

I am very intrigued what my book clubbers made of this as it is their first Robinson story...