Excerpt from Jack by Marilynne Robinson, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Oh, nothing."

That meant she chose not to say it again, whatever it was. "Nothing" was a finger to the lips, a confidence she had thought better of. A confidence. Then she realized she should not be so much at ease with him. She decided to be reticent about the kinds of thoughts she didn't usually allow herself, after almost speaking them. If she had said those words, it meant she liked the night well enough, and he felt a tentative kind of pride in the thought. The night and the place were his own, more or less, and she was his guest in them, now that she had begun to seem a little more at ease.

She said, "It just seems to me sometimes as though—if we were the only ones left after the world ended, and we made the rules—they might work just as well—"

He laughed. "There's a thought. Jack Boughton makes the rules! Too bad there wouldn't be a few other people around to, you know, feel their force. Not that I carry grudges. Still. The first rule would be that everyone had to mind me. And the second would be that they could not hide their chagrin."

Silence.

She meant to be taken seriously. He'd known that, and still, he'd made his joke. So he said, "An interesting idea, certainly." They were strangers killing time. Remember that. Somehow he had been imagining something else, an almost wordless peace between them, a night like a ghostly presence witnessing this most improbable meeting, quiet and more quiet until she was gone and he had days to himself to remember her and nothing to regret. But she was serious, no doubt to keep their circumstance from taking on another character than detachment, from sliding into distrust or old anger. Might as well make the most of it.

She said, "I didn't mean you and me. I meant any two strangers."

"So long as one of them wasn't Rasputin. I'm sorry. You mean strangers in the abstract. I'm sure they exist somewhere, for purposes of argument. None in my immediate acquaintance. Strangers in the abstract always turn out to be fairly drearily particular on acquaintance. Under the slightest scrutiny, really. A glance will destroy the illusion. In my experience."

She shook her head, and said nothing. And why would she bother, when he kept on talking, and seemed to want to make a joke out of everything, and make the same sort of display of himself he made even when he was alone, toying with words, a sort of fidgeting of the brain. When her very hand on his arm meant that he could know a few of her thoughts if he were calm and a little tactful. "Sorry."

"No. That's all right. I understand what you mean about people. But they see more and know more and think about more than they would ever have any practical use for. I see that all the time. Even in children. They have their ideas about what is true or fair. About what matters. In the abstract."

"Agreed. Yes. But could we have a slightly larger population left after Doomsday? If there could be two, there could be two dozen, I suppose. I know I'm being literal-minded. But I try to imagine these two castaways absorbing the terrible fact, and then one of them saying to the other one, in this void, in this empty world—You know what we need around here? Some rules! When they had completely outlived any need for them? The one good thing about it all. Emily Post, Deuteronomy, the entire regime gone. It's not as if they'd want to murder, being just the two of them. They wouldn't need to steal, since there'd be no one around to own anything. They could forget about adultery."

"I think they'd talk about how things should have been. While there was still a chance. That's what I mean."

He nodded. "Interesting. But—sorry to be so literal—shouldn't we know how the world ended? That would be on their minds, I think."

"All right. It was struck by a meteor."

"Not our fault, then."

"No and yes. Like the Flood."

"Hmm. I see. So it's still that kind of universe."

Excerpted from Jack by Marilynne Robinson. Copyright © 2020 by Marilynne Robinson. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.