A Novel's Moving Portrait of Christian Grace

In one sense, Marilynne Robinson's Jack is a simple love story, one complicated by the harsh realities of Jim Crow, but still at bottom the beautifully quaint tale of how Jack Boughton and Della Miles met and fell in love in segregated St. Louis, Missouri. On the surface, the narrative is both agonizing and exhilarating, suspenseful and inevitable. It is agonizing and suspenseful because we’ve been introduced to Jack in a prior Robinson novel, Home, and we expect him to be irredeemable and unloveable. In many parts of the book he meets those expectations.