![]() ![]() ![]() In their near-solitude, they discuss poetry and the denominations in which they were raised. Robinson gives the couple the space to roam in the dark, where their bodies touch from time to time. Della, who shares with Jack an interest in poetry, comes for writerly inspiration and is wise enough to carry flowers in case she meets a guard who questions her presence. ![]() The encounter is unplanned: Jack, who lives in a rooming house and has served time for theft, makes a habit of wandering the city. There is no safe place for them, but there are fewer spectators among the headstones and obelisks than elsewhere there is also, of course, the stark presence of death. This unwelcoming world is no surprise to Jack and Della, and Robinson fittingly sets one of their longest scenes together in a cemetery. It is the reason Della’s father receives Jack in Memphis and says, “You can never be welcome here.” Their marriage cannot, and does not, exist on paper, yet it is the reason Jack’s Chicago landlady expels him (“I took you for a decent man!”). Della is a Black schoolteacher and the daughter of a Methodist bishop Jack, the son of a Presbyterian minister, is white, often drunk, and erratically employed. Each minute they spend together in public is an act of trespass to be near her, he knows, is to endanger her. The marriage in Marilynne Robinson’s latest novel, Jack, is also an “unmarriage ” Jack Boughton is an “unhusband” to Della Miles. ![]()
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