Robinson has said, over the years, that she keeps returning to Gilead because she misses the characters, or wants to give some previously secondary figure the depth and attention afforded a protagonist. Robinson’s fiction investigates, again and again, the connection between the soul’s isolation and its torment. For some reason no one can quite understand or articulate-himself least of all-he is set apart, unlike his family or neighbors. He has been plagued from a very young age by a deep feeling of estrangement. It was feral, and fragile.” He is also, as a child and then as a man, intensely thoughtful, a voracious reader, gentle in his manner, oddly bewitching.

“More thoroughgoing than modesty or reticence.

“There was an aloofness about him,” Glory recalls. A strange and destructive child, he didn’t just vanish at inconvenient moments he blew up mailboxes, stole things for the sake of stealing them, drank, skipped church, and was generally unbiddable. In the previous books, Robinson offered Jack to readers through the eyes of others. But Jack focuses on, as its title would suggest, the character who has eluded, bedeviled, and grieved all the people who have ever loved him: the prodigal son.įrom the October 2014 issue: Leslie Jamison reviews ‘Lila’ Glory, the youngest Boughton daughter and the presiding perspective in Home, as well as Teddy, one of Glory and Jack’s three brothers, hover on the periphery. The Reverends Robert Boughton and John Ames, boyhood best friends who grew up in Gilead in the early 20th century and became preachers together, are now old men near death the father and godfather, respectively, of Jack, they await his return home before it’s too late. Jack, the fourth and newest novel in the series, invokes characters who will be familiar to readers of Gilead (2004), Home (2008), and Lila (2014). Glory, enraged at Jack’s power to end games simply by disappearing, and mystified that he does so, storms up to him when he returns and shouts: “What right do you have to be so strange!” It’s a scalding exchange, not just because Glory is furious but because she has spoken aloud the question common to everyone in their hometown of Gilead, Iowa. But they would look for him, as if the game now were to find him at mischief. Then someone would say his name, the first to notice his absence, and the game would dissolve. When they were children he would slip away, leave the game of tag, leave the house, and not be missed because he was so quiet.

Synopsis of home before dark novel