The author of Gilead on the Black Lives Matter protests, the dangers of social media, and her latest novel, Jack
Marilynne Robinson is an American novelist and essayist. One of Barack Obama’s favourite authors, she won the Pulitzer prize for fiction in 2005 for her novel Gilead. This was the first in a trilogy of books that chronicle the spiritual journeys of two families in a fictional mid-western town. Her new book, Jack, returns to the most enigmatic character in the series, as he embarks on an interracial relationship in segregated St Louis. Robinson lives in Iowa, where she set her Gilead novels.
Your new book reacquaints us with the sad and troubled world of Jack Boughton, the wayward son of a small-town Presbyterian minister. What made you decide to revisit his story?
Jack was still on my mind. When I am writing a novel I find that characters become well known and important to me out of all proportion to their place in that particular fiction. And it seemed to me also that the world of the novels would be stabilised, in a sense, if this absent central figure, whom they all love, were known, given his own life. He characterises the place and the times by what he has to deal with, and the culture of his family by what in it he is, after his fashion, loyal to.
