At the heart of this novel is the slow burn of two people falling in love.
Jack Boughton, an inveterate bum, a prodigal son to his endlessly patient preacher father, falls in love with Della Miles, a teacher at a prestigious high school.
Della is much younger than Jack, a proud, educated and beautiful woman. She too is the daughter of a pastor, and she is black.
Jack is white and they are in segregated St Louis after World War II. Simply to be seen alone together after dark could get them into trouble. In spite, or perhaps because of this hard, cold fact, their courtship is a slow dance. And Robinson's work asks for a slow reading too.
The first scene, a fraught and yet wonderful evening in which Jack chaperones Della around the Bellefontaine cemetery at night, runs to more than 70 pages.
This is the fourth novel in Robinson's Gilead quartet. It predates the others - her Pulitzer prize-winning Gilead, Home and Lila.
You don't have to have read the other novels to enjoy this fine work. But if you have, you'll better understand the milieu from which Jack comes: his siblings, his father's church and community in rural Iowa, his father's best friend and lifelong theological sparring partner, John Ames, after whom Jack is named.
All those decent Iowans shadow Jack around lush St Louis as he falls in love with one Della Miles.
Robinson has looped back around to begin this novel before the others in the series. Within Jack, she also moves seamlessly to and fro in his life and across the lovely and fraught courtship with Della. (Robinson is an admirable technician as much as a writer of beautiful, profound prose.)
Jack is a man tormented and not only by a past of petty theft, binge-drinking, a prison stint and a deceased infant daughter, whom he abandoned to the care of his family. But these are all more symptom than cause. A restless soul, he is a moral scrapper, the black sheep of his family, the only one among them who has never been able to sup from the sustaining certainties of their Protestant faith.
He worries inside his own skin, acts up, gets cornered and moves on to the next flophouse, job or bar. But trouble always follows.
When his brother Teddy sends him money to come home for his mother's funeral, he instead takes Della out to dinner. But at dinner, he runs into creditors, is roughed up and leaves Della, oblivious, waiting at a table inside.
A year after this woeful outing, he catches sight of Della inside the Bellefontaine cemetery at night. The gates have closed and she is trapped for the night.
The cemetery, like so much else in America of the time, is a baited trap for a black person: it is somewhere she should not be. He squires her around the cemetery as they wait for morning.
They talk, rest, walk barefoot and discuss the soul, poetry, Milton, their families, Shakespeare, theology, predestination and race. Robinson's prose, her whole craft, is deceptively simple, almost ponderous at times. But it is dense and supple too, full of considerations of the minutiae that make up a life. She is achingly good at illuminating Jack's small private thoughts, desires and griefs.
In Della's company, Jack experiences pure and easy happiness for the first time in his life. For Della, the rare companionship and intellectual company she finds with Jack will never be found among the proud, single-minded people in her own community.
They are fixed on one goal only: lifting up their fellow Negroes and living by the protective doctrine of separatism.
But Jack and Della's love is also an impossibility, a wrecking ball which will surely smash Della Miles. Jack knows that she will bear the brunt of both the law and moral outrage when their liaison is discovered. As they walk around Bellefontaine cemetery, they imagine Doomsday and the end of the world, everyone but them obliterated. This is the only way they can picture being allowed to be together, undisturbed.
They must do away with white and black to imagine their own Eden.
A small criticism of this otherwise exceptional novel it is that Della is sometimes too cloyingly good, too patient, too willing to jump ship with Jack and abandon all the comforts and protections her substantial family and her father's reputation provide her.
But this is a small price to pay to be in the company of such a beautifully shaded character as Jack Boughton.
There is a wonderful quality of fixedness to Robinson's work and to her portrayal of the ordinary folk in the Gilead series.
If you have the patience to let Jack unfold, it's a work which will stay with you long after the final page.
- Christine Kearney is a Canberra-based writer.
