Your story in this week’s issue, “Jack and Della,” is adapted from your forthcoming novel, “Jack,” the fourth book in your Gilead series. Were you planning, from the beginning, to make this a four-part series?
I never actually planned to write a second Gilead novel, or a first one, for that matter. The origin of each of the books is the same: I have the sensation of a distinctive voice in my mind, which I know will support a novel-length narrative. That these voices all belong to Gileadites is probably due to the fact that all of them have more life than their first appearance—a story told in someone else’s voice—can accommodate. I always think I am embarking on an enormous novel, then find it has ended at about three hundred pages. Finally, it seems I have written one enormous novel.
The titular Jack, the son of Robert Boughton, was, in a sense, the black sheep of his family, and broke his father’s heart by leaving home after impregnating a young girl. In “Gilead,” he comes back to see whether he can bring his common-law wife, Della, who is Black, and their child to live there. What made you want to devote a whole novel to this character?
His voice was in my head.
Do you think that Jack’s is the last voice from “Gilead” that will inhabit you, or might there be others to come?
On the basis of previous experience, I really can’t say.
In “Jack and Della,” you reimagine Jack’s first encounters with Della, which were described in passing in “Gilead.” When you were writing “Gilead,” did you have a clear sense of Della, or is her character essentially new to this book?
Yes, she was quite real to me.
When the story begins, Jack is newly released from prison. He’s wearing a dark suit he’s bought to wear to his mother’s funeral, though he has made no plans to go to the service. Is he in a particularly susceptible state?
Jack is not in the habit of being treated with kindness or courtesy. He doesn’t feel at all deserving of them, because he is, at that very time, hurting his father and his family yet again. And he can talk with Della. They have interests and background in common. So the meeting is emotionally charged for him.
Jack has been a problem since boyhood, a constant heartbreak for his reverend father. When Della tells him about a book she has, he hopes she won’t put it down next to him, because he doesn’t want to be tempted to steal it. Are his “defects of character” actually his character, as he suspects? Could he change?
Do people change? Or do they find and accept the opportunity to manifest another side of their character? Or do they accept the grace of being accepted, faults and all? I consider this an open question.
Della clearly sees that Jack has misled her, that he is a drifter with a questionable past. And he’s white. Why does she pursue contact with him, knowing how dangerous it is in nineteen-fifties Missouri, where miscegenation is illegal?
Della is interested in Jack and attracted to him, as people are to one another. And she doesn’t want to abide by the constraints of the larger society or the constraints of her father’s resistance to the norms of the larger society. She wants to act on the basis of her own feelings.
