Picador Jack (Oprah's Book Club)

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Em Jack, Marilynne Robinson volta ao universo de Gilead, esse é o quarto romance da série, e quinto da escritora em 40 anos. É novamente um mergulho num mundo pautado pela dicotomia entre o religioso e o mundano, o sacro e o profano. Situado no pós-Segunda Guerra, na época das Leis de Jim Crow, o livro é sobre um história de amor que desafia a sociedade.Jack sempre foi um personagem misterioso, já foi visto como ladrão, infiel, descrente, mentiroso e sempre uma decepção para si mesmo e sua família, mas sua história pessoal nunca tinha sido contada. Aqui, ele se apaixona por Della, jovem professora negra, filha de um bispo. Mas, segundo as leis contra miscigenação, eles não podem nem ficar próximos. A primeira cena é longa e coloca a narrativa em movimento: se passa num cemitério à noite, acompanhando um encontro às escondidas entre os dois. Embora não seja narrado em primeira pessoa, Jack é o foco narrativo e centro de consciência e moral do romance, o que quer dizer que a consciência e a moral aqui são tão vacilantes quanto ele.Acompanhamos sua vida errante, sem rumo, repleta de incidentes, e longe de sua família. Sabemos de maneira tangencial sobre outros personagens da série, como seu pai, o Reverendo John Ames. Mas é do romance entre ele e Della que emerge sua maior questão ética: insistir no namoro é, acima de tudo, criar um grande problema para ela. Por outro lado, existe um problema de classe também na relação. A jovem, uma professora e filha de “uma das famílias mais respeitosas desse lugar”, está acima do protagonista que vive de pequenos expedientes, e cuja vida não tem rumo.Robinson se descreve como uma liberal protestante, e religião, ou a busca por um ser maior, uma repressão, e também uma moral religiosa, são forças que se digladiam com o mundo em sua obra. A busca de todos e todas é por um estado de graça, e se as personagens não encontram isso, por um lado, por outro, seus romances parecem encontrar – ou chegam a algo bem parecido. Há algo de sublime em sua prosa, nas descrições, uma espécie de leveza que atinge uma profundidade densa.

If you like subtle shades of feeling and forensic nuances of shame, you will love Jack.The first 78 pages contain a marvellous, sparkling dialogue between Jack, a down-and-out, shame-ridden, white Presbyterian minister's son, and Della, the spirited, black, pretty, school-teacher daughter of a leading Baptist minister. The conversation between the two - sometimes luminously at one, at others quietly accusatory - takes place in a graveyard during the course of a long night. The two have been accidentally locked in, or so it appears at first. These opening pages are an astonishingly brave and serious duet (from a writerly perspective).Though the word 'love' does not appear for many pages, this is above all a tale of a most unlikely affair. Other reviewers have commented on the theological content, and the necessity of Calvinist predestination to maintain the dynamism of the unlikely pairing. But I disagree. The grace to which Jack grudgingly admits that he is beholden - despite, and because of, his thieving, drunken, and apparently weak character - is that of the human spirit, held in the palm of an ultimately loving universe.Robinson inverts the usual power-relationships: the white man is poor and feeble, his black girl-friend brave and well-employed; her black father is formidable, his father is endlessly forgiving. However, the racial context is secondary and down-played. The gripping central dynamic takes place inside the head of Jack Boughton, from whose perspective the story is told: does he, should he, dare to believe that this accomplished, sensitive young lady can love him? And can he, ought he - a disreputable wastrel whose very presence will destroy his loved one's career and prospects - give her up?There are marvellous scenes besides those between Jack and Della. For example, when the kind librarian makes a connection with Jack; when Della’s sister Julia tries to make Jack angry so that she can dismiss him; or when the boarding house lady in Chicago discovers that Jack’s ‘wife’ is black.The story is almost timeless, in a literal sense. There are a few bus trips and one mention of Fred Astaire, but otherwise the novel could be taking place in the segregated USA any time between about 1870 and about 1960, though doubtless eagle-eyed readers will find many small pointers to the actual setting of about 1950.On the downside, the descriptions of Jack’s internal thought and feeling processes lose momentum when he is not interacting with Della. Equally, Jack’s scruples and ceaseless introspection seem too fine for a drunk whose first instincts on entering a shop are to steal what he can. There is some exploration about why Jack is so morally (if charmingly) feeble, but nothing convincing. Della’s subterranean attraction to Jack is well developed, but again, I failed to understand why she is so determined to love him (no doubt, she wants to save him, and they connect intellectually, but is that enough?). Finally, the last 100 pages lack the freshness and sense of discovery of the first 200: they are in a sense repetitive scenes of Jack’s passive closeness to Della, though there is a fascination in knowing if they will stick together or not.Overall, Robinson shines like no other in her dialogue and the quick thoughts that float in Jack’s mind as he speaks. There are magnetic layers of sensitivity in her creative, clandestine verbal combats. But this fourth novel in the series is weaker in psychological convincingness. Gilead and Lila are less daring but more successful, in my view. Even so, my rating is 5 stars.

From the American Association for Gifted Children, 1978, pg. 9, quoting a gifted boy: "We are not 'normal' and we know it; it can be fun sometimes but not funny always. We tend to be much more sensitive than other people. Multiple meanings, innuendos, and self-consciousness plague us. Intensive self-analysis, self-criticism, and the ability to recognize that we have limits makes us despondent."It is my contention that Jack Boughton is not only a gifted person, but what is defined as "twice exceptional."The novel JACK makes me recalibrate the essence of the other Gilead books. While the narrator of GILEAD is the old preacher John Ames, the protagonist is clearly Jack. The gentle, mostly wise old Pastor Ames can't allow himself to understand until near the end of the book that he has rejected and even hated Jack from the moment Jack's father "tricked" Ames into trying to accept the infant boy by naming him John Ames Boughton. He rejects Jack because he is still grieving for his own dead infant and sees Jack as a cuckoo child, a usurper. Ames can't even feel good when he touches Jack's brow to baptize him.The resentment is total and quickly suppressed, but Jack feels it then, and he feels it as he is growing up in a family so cohesive and righteous in their faith that there literally is no place for him to become himself. He was a difficult breach birth, hurting his mother even before his entry into a world he continues to feel is hostile to him. He quickly becomes the scapegoat of the family to the point that they suspect him not only of the small wrongs and pranks he does commit, but of larger, uglier crimes he does not. In other words, he feels early on that he can do nothing right and begins to act out and withdraw. His siblings love him, but they also love to worry about him and to tattle on him, keeping him the perpetual outsider. True to their faith, they also love to forgive him, over and over again. They love to despair over him and pray for him. You might say he is their most important family project, and it is not a success because try as they might, they can never understand him. The more they pray over him to become a good preacher's son, the more he feels compelled to act out against it. Old Ames thinks Jack's precociousness is arrogance, when in truth it is only an abiding insecurity.Jack learns early to hide his hurt under a veneer of indifference. Throughout GILEAD and HOME, he is testing his loved ones, and they keep failing the test, particularly his father, whose throwaway, thoughtless answers to Jack's probing questions about the Civil Rights struggle must cut Jack to the quick every time his father dismisses Jack's concerns.Old Ames dislikes Jack so much that he is sure Jack has come home in order to do something awful, like stealing Lila and his son away from him. Ames is convinced of it and can barely hide his jealousy even from himself. It isn't until Jack is finally able to share his secret with the old man that Ames understands how wrong he has done him, but even at the end, he cannot pass the ultimate test and embrace Jack's wife and child, invite them into his heart, and use his considerable influence to make Jacks' family life in Gilead possible or even bearable. As Jack gets ready to leave town, Ames finally finds within him the strength to bless him—not understanding that the only reason Jack is allowing this belated baptism is because he has given up on life altogether. In JACK, he tells Pastor Hutchins that he has been contemplating suicide but will not do it while his father is still alive. And he also says that Della is his sole reason for living. So in the end of GILEAD, when he thinks he will never see Della or his son again, and knows that his father is dying, we understand what his next step is likely to be.GILEAD has a more extensive timeline than JACK, and HOME goes one step further, in that we witness the irony of Della and his son showing up a couple of days after he disappears, so that he will never know that there has been a reprieve.I am struck by Glory's passion for the little girl who died and for the child's mother. She even considered kidnapping the baby and/or bringing its mother into town to live. Yet when Glory introduces herself to Jack's bi-racial son, she does not say, "I'm your aunt," instead, she says, "I'm your father's sister." Nor does she press Della and him very hard to come into the house, doesn't insist on exchanging addresses so they might stay in touch—all she does is hand the boy a souvenir of Jack as a good-bye gift.In HOME, we see Jack not through old Ames' jaundiced eyes but through Glory's resentful ones. As she slowly begins to register his humanity, we see that he was much more deeply affected by the big sin of his youth than his family ever understood. In truth, he was so shocked by his own misdeed that he condemns himself to permanent exile and a living death as punishment, a punishment he renews by sabotaging himself whenever things begin to go even the slightest bit well for him. Thus he makes himself fail at every task, every job, every relationship.His dream was that his family will accept Della and his son, but he soon realizes, each time his father reveals his prejudices, how impossible that dream actually is.In new-age terms, Jack and Della are twin souls. The author makes it obvious during the long cemetery dialogue, when they discover that they are on the same wavelength in so many ways. Souls have no race, no color, no age, no prejudices, no labels. Della and Jack know this instinctively. It is a knowledge so deep and immediate that they cannot ignore it. Della is everything Jack's family wants so much for him to be: an obedient child who cheerfully accepts the mold her father presses her into, growing into adulthood willing to live her life according to the wishes of her proud, loving, separatist father. And yet she longs to be free of his expectations but in a sense keeps being recaptured to follow the path her family has laid for her. Allowing herself to love Jack sets her free of this family bondage, but she remains trapped in a dehumanizing system of ever greater proportions.I have read that gifted children are special needs children, and that those needs are seldom met or even understood. Surely, Jack was such a child. Gifted children who are not understood are often oppositional. They might act out, and can have severe ADD, which they can easily disguise from the world because of their intelligence. Jack, who loves to learn, nonetheless makes his brother Teddy take his classes and write his exams. What appears as laziness might simply be an inability to remain focused. Just to make matters worse, he is born with the alcoholic gene. Once he takes his first drink, the syndrome is triggered and will dog him for the rest of his days. He drinks to punish himself. After the first sip, he is a goner. Every time he crawls out of the hole of his addiction and starts a new foothold in life, he soon sabotages himself with the next bout of drunkenness.His opinion of himself is so low that he sees himself as a jailbird even when he is not guilty. It's almost as if he's thinking, "if people think I am bad, then I must be bad." After he is convicted for something he didn't do, he considers himself every bit as guilty as the Judge who sentences him does. Jack sees himself as a draft dodger even though he is rejected as unsuitable by the military. Having been raised in the unworldly, religious atmosphere of his father's house in Gilead, he doesn't understand the rules of the gutter, is cheated out of his freedom, out of his pay, out of his cash, again and again. He sees himself as someone who has no rights and no claims, who deserves not only a living hell but is predestined for perdition. Although he rejects his family's religious faith, he retains the belief that he is worthless and deserves eternal damnation.Can you imagine how different the outcome would have been if his father had bequeathed the house to him instead of to Glory—or, better yet, to them both? Della and his son could have been able to come home to stay.If the author plans to continue the saga, a good place to take the next book would be to the two little boys, after each of them has lost his father. Can you imagine a time so cruel that Pastor Ames, who has served his town over his entire life, as did his father and grandfather before him, is convinced that as soon as he is dead, his wife and child will be ejected, with no place to live, no income, forced to move to a fallen down shack with a leaking roof where they might not survive the next winter? Can you imagine that Glory would NOT invite them to move into her big empty house? Can you imagine Jack's son standing at the door one day, as a teenager or young adult, his father's river-picture in his hands, looking for answers? I can.Anyone who wants to understand the nature of Jack should watch this video from ZDogg MD entitled, The Curse of the Gifted: The Challenges of High IQ Children

I do not like Jack. He bores me in a way, promises to do better, kind of tries,but misses out, then promises again and fails. I like Della, a high school teacher, a sweet, quiet, pretty young woman, very intelligent. These two feel they are soul mates. I liked the preacher, Reverent Hutchins, of Zion Baptist Church. One Sunday he preached a stern sermon. Jack felt he was talking to him, but he was talking to many. Jack began going to Zion Baptist, a black church, because he could get fed.So many tried to help Jack, he was weak or he liked being who he was, though not always. Sometimes he was sorry, though not enough to change.Jack's father and doctor brother send him money quite often which he depends on, but tries to act as though he really doesn't need it. He does have his pride.This is the fourth "Gilead" book. It is not set in Gilead, but in St Louis, a small time in Chicago. Jack walks the streets at night, steals and is stolen from. jack is an alcoholic, tries to give up drinking, but seemingly cannot. Hid life seems monotonous, same over and over again, in and out of jail like a revolving door. The time is the late 40s, early 50s.The book is set in Jack's mind and surroundings. The way he sees life. He rents a room in a seedy hotel, cheap, low class. Jack feels he is above those in his surroundings. He has many talents, art and drawing, he teaches dancing in a studio, has some jobs washing dishes.Jack met Della one evening when the wind blew away some books and papers. he helped her return them. He walked the streets of the black neighborhoods hoping to see her. Never. They met again in the grounds of the beautiful Bellefontaine Cemetery. They are locked in for the night. The two talk, both are preacher's kids, Della, an excellent Methodist preacher, well known, in Memphis, Jack's father, a small town Presbyterian preacher. Jack was intelligent, well spoken, liked poetry as did Della. He had talents he refused to use. Della was impressed by him, a good woman can change a man.The characters in the first three "Gilead" books were lovers of life, hard workers, had bad things happen in their lives, overcame wrongs and deaths of loved ones, went on with their lives. Jack had many talents, many who were there to help him. He cared not, too much trouble.Book is well written, so a three. It does have its moments. Much philosophy, much theology.