To paraphrase Whitehead, the safest general characterization of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead novels is that they consist of a series of footnotes to Housekeeping. That first novel is so densely yet lyrically written; to look up a fond phrase is to risk losing a whole afternoon. All the themes of her later novels are there in nuce. From Gilead to Lila, we find the cold, black water of Fingerbone seeping into sunlit Midwestern parsonages.

So when we come to Jack, we are not surprised to find him saying things like, “The word ‘lake’ is related to the word ‘lack.’ An absence.” The lake in Housekeeping is the town’s shadow, the home of all its missing citizens, the presence of everything lost; it is the world in negative. In the lake, all our familiar oppositions are destabilized— “a good foundation was worse than useless. A house should have a compass and a keel.” On the shore, society’s regulars live out their quiet desperation; below the surface, the outcasts and dropouts make their life in death. Housekeeping is the story of a passage into that underworld, to Ruthie’s becoming one of the lake’s restless ghosts. She says of her aunt, as Sylvie inducts her into the life of a transient, “I dreamed that Sylvie was teaching me to walk under water.”

Jack seems to have been born underwater. Though not exactly a transient, he is a drifter. He drifts in place, the place being St. Louis, bumming from job to job, flop to flop. Speaking of St. Louis, it’s remarkable how little the Mississippi figures in the novel (“the brown god is almost forgotten”). But then, there is nothing riverine about Jack Boughton, nothing coursing; he is indeed a lake creature (a “lack” creature). Jack is an alcoholic who lives one step ahead of his barroom creditors. He is a convicted thief, a penitentiary graduate.