But a good Calvinist would hasten to add that Jack is not alone. How did people live? His oldest question.” Jack seems to live under a cosmic curse. Even “recommending a book of poetry to someone became displacement that struck where it would, as it would, converting itself in midair into malice or stupidity. Throughout the novel every one of his acts, no matter how small, seems to hurt someone. This has been true of me my whole life.” After years of following these impulses, “I isolate myself as a way of limiting the harm I can do.” As he confesses to a black pastor, “I am aware instantly and almost obsessively of anything fragile, with the thought that I must and will break it. They are far more likely to want and do ill-to others and themselves.Ĭalvin wrote it, Jack is living it. God created humanity good, but the Fall damaged human nature, twisting it around from good to evil, and as a result human beings are completely incapable, absent grace, of being good. “Perverse” and “depraved” descend from Latin words with meanings like crooked, turned, and twisted. Few others would wrap themselves in Calvin’s mantle, not least because of what he has to say about sin: humanity is “utterly perverse” and lives in a state of “total depravity.” That sounds bad, but a look at the Latin roots makes it worse. She is probably the most famous self-described Calvinist in America. It must overcome both social barriers and Jack’s sense that he is lost, and would only take Della with him. I kept him pretty well supplied with them.” The novel follows their strange and unsteady courtship. “He saw signs of reprobation in me, hard as he tried not to,” Jack tells Della, a black woman who is also a minister’s child. Jack is a lifelong thief, a compulsive drinker, and a constant source grief to his father, a Presbyterian minister.

She keeps some of her old characters, though, most notably Jack. Accordingly, Robinson leaves the small town of Gilead, Iowa (the primary setting of her last three novels) for the mixed-race metropolis of St. Race and sin are the sum of things un-hoped for, the evidence that good American Protestants would rather not see. Robinson is as profoundly American as she is profoundly religious, and these are two of the great problems of American religious and national life. Two great themes have troubled Marilynne Robinson’s novels: race and sin.

Marilynne robinson jack