4.5 Stars
The novel focuses on Jack Boughton, the prodigal son of Gilead’s Presbyterian minister. Just out of prison, he meets Della Miles, a black high school teacher who is also the child of a preacher. The two fall in love, but there are obvious problems because their relationship is not only socially unacceptable but illegal in 1950s Missouri.
The characterization of Jack is outstanding. Cultured and charming, he could almost be described as a bit of a Renaissance man, but it is his deficiencies that are more prominent. Fully aware of his shortcomings, he describes himself accurately: “’I’m a gifted thief. I lie fluently, often for no reason. I’m a bad but confirmed drunk. I have no talent for friendship. What talents I do have I make no use of.’” In fact, he often calls himself the Prince of Darkness. He believes his legacy is doing harm though he often has excuses for his behaviour: “But excuses only meant that he had done harm he did not intend, which was another proof that he did harm inevitably, intentions be damned.” He tries to make “a vocation of harmlessness” but in his relationship with Della he knows that his mere presence is a danger to her: “Once again I am a person of consequence. I am able to do harm. I can only do harm.” “She couldn’t be seen walking down the street with him without damage to her reputation, a risk a teacher can’t take” and even if he does something innocent like walking down her street to ensure that she arrived home safely, “someone will see me, someone will talk. I’ll be feeding the rumors that will sooner or later burst into scandal.” Only by staying away can he ensure she will be safe from his harm; only then would her life be “unthreatened by his Jackness, Jackitude, Jackicity.”
What he does not understand about himself is why he behaves as he does: “He had never been good at explaining the things he did. It was just alarming to him to consider how much sense they always made at the time, or in any case, how unavoidable they seemed. He suspected he drank to give himself a way of accounting for the vast difference between any present situation and the intentions that bought him to it.” Though Jack is “confounded by himself,” his actions do weigh heavily on his conscience: “Jack had dabbled in shame, and it still coursed through him, malarial, waking him up to sweat and pace until, unsoothed, unrationalized, unshriven, it secreted itself again in his bones, and at the base of his skull.”
All this brings to mind the question as to what a “good Christian woman” from a prominent black family sees in this reprobate. He is an intelligent man and perhaps that is what attracts her to him because “Cleverness has a special piquancy when it blooms out of the fraying sleeve of failure.” Della, however, claims to have seen his soul: “’once in a lifetime, maybe, you look at a stranger and you see a soul, a glorious presence out of place in the world. And if you love God, every choice is made for you. There is no turning away. You’ve seen the mystery – you’ve seen what life is about. What it’s for. And a soul has no earthly qualities, no history among the things of this world, no guilt or injury or failure. No more than a flame would have. There is nothing to be said about it except that it is a holy human soul. And it is a miracle when you recognize it. . . . since it’s your soul I’ve seen, I know better than to think about you the way people do when they judge.’” We can only take her at her word because the risks she takes have such grave consequences for her.
There is an almost overwhelming aura of sadness throughout the book. Given the time period, there is little hope for a happy ending. Jack points out to Della, “’If they decide we’re cohabiting, we could both go to jail.’” Della responds, “’I know that. My father got a copy of the statute and made me read it to him. So he’d be sure I was paying attention.’” Della’s family objects to the relationship, and it breaks the heart of her father whom she loves very much. Jack knows “He was guilty of exposing this wonderful woman to risks – no, call them dangers – that he could not protect her from.”
Despite this sadness, there are touches of humour. Seeing a spider, Jack says to Della, “’I’m thinking about bugs’” only to have her respond with “’The gangster? The bunny?’” And there are lines like, “he was accused of cheating at cards because he was cheating at cards” and “It was as if he were being forced to see his whole life under an unbearably bright light. Was. The experience was not at all subjunctive.”
As many of the above quotations indicate, the prose is beautiful. The vocabulary may well send readers to a dictionary; words like condign, convivium, cerements, cicatrix, concatenation, apophatic, homilectical, legerdemain, and divagations are used. Literary allusions abound; there are references to poets like Robert Frost, Paul Dunbar, William Carlos Williams, and John Milton, and literary works like Pilgrim’s Progress, Macbeth, and Hamlet.
In light of the racial unrest sweeping the United States, this is a timely novel inspiring readers to think about racial injustice. Jack laments that “the whole world has made and kept this infernal compact, making transgression and crime of something innocent, if anything could be called innocent, a marriage of true minds.”
My one complaint about the book is the slow opening scenes which consist of conversations between Jack and Della when they first meet. The night-long cemetery conversation in particular seems interminable and becomes tedious to say the least. I certainly don’t care about the differences between Methodists and Presbyterians. Readers who persevere past this beginning will be rewarded.
This book can be read without any knowledge of the other books in the Gilead series (Gilead, Home, and Lila). Each of the previous books was nominated and/or won major literary awards, and I’ll be surprised if Jack does not appear on the lists of these awards for 2020.
Note: I received a digital galley of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.
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