Marilynne RobinsonJack

Abstract

ceremony, as a frame for this story, and perhaps object as well to his revealing details of a sweat lodge ceremony in a way that borders on a “how-to” guide, the lessons he shares from these experiences as well as his other life experiences are sorely needed in today’s world. Wagamese’s life was more challenging than most. Born into a traditional family, his first home, a canvas tent on a trapline in the bush outside of Minaki, Ontario, Wagamese was taken from his parents at a young age and soon separated from his siblings, going from foster home to foster home before finally being adopted. Throughout these years, he was surrounded by non-Native people both at home and at school, teased and bullied, never given access to cultural knowledge or community; he only briefly had one Native friend, from whom he was separated when leaving his last foster home. Eventually running away, Wagamese ends up on the streets at a young age, developing a nearly lifelong problem with alcohol and having a number of run-ins with the law that resulted in periodic incarceration as a young man. For those who will never spend four days on the land fasting under the tutelage of a Native ceremonial leader, Wagamese teaches some of the rich lessons that come from such a pedagogy—first, to love ourselves , “that you can never be less than who you were created to be. You never have to qualify . . . You just need to be.” He teaches us that “learning involves sacrifice” but that the “Creator placed the gift of Truth and Life” inside of each of us. These lessons lead us to live in the original way taught to us by our animal relatives—given a sacred responsibility by the Creator to never give up on us, as “good teachers never stop being teachers.” They also lead us to balance and being of “One Mind” with all of Creation, away from such destructive forces as greed, jealousy, judgment, anger, insecurity, and resentment. Wagamese urges North American Indigenous readers to embrace the role of teacher and nurturer to our settler-colonial neighbors as “this land’s guardians” who “know how to honour this land” and thereby show others how to live on and with it. In this spirit, Wagamese conveys important life lessons to his son and, vicariously, to us, lessons worth learning if we hope to rebalance ourselves and the world in this Anthropocene era. Kimberly Wieser University of Oklahoma Marilynne Robinson Jack New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2020. 309 pages. THE GILEAD CYCLE is a series of theological novels (Gilead, Home, Lila, and now Jack) that explore the nature of grace through the lives of two families in the eponymous, fictional town in 1950s Iowa. Its literary context is shaped by Shakespeare, on one hand, and the theologians John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards on the other; these influences perhaps bring the immeasurable depth of psychological description and character. Robinson also foregrounds a theatrical emphasis on scenery—a graveyard figures as one very pointed setting—as well as the randomness of redemption. Between these two poles, Robinson’s novels enact the work of naming, of giving a name and bearing a name. To have a name is to be exposed to the fleeting conference of our inward experiences of guilt and forgiveness with the outer societal, religious, and cosmological event—like a comet—of grace: it attaches itself to a name, and Robinson brings this out, like no one else can, in the way in which the Congregationalist minister John Ames blesses his namesake, John Ames “Jack” Boughton, in the closing pages of Gilead. That the work of naming is a central concern of Robinson’s work is evinced by the many occasions therein where naming is performed on behalf of another, and in the case of the present volume this is clearer than ever. Jack is the desperately sad love story of Jack Boughton and Della Miles, a white man and a black woman in the context of segregation—an impossible love. Like Lila in the novel devoted to her, Jack is a human being fated to name himself. For...