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

"No," she said. "No."

Then, even while he thought better of it, he asked her, "Why not?"

"There are just some people you trust."

"You could think of me as a thief if you wanted to."

"So I must not want to."

"Would it be better to be alone, or to be alone with a thief? I think that's an interesting question."

"I think you're trying to worry me. Anyway, it would depend on the thief."

"Right. And you and I have things in common. Fine families and so on." He said, "If there'd been only one thief at the crucifixion, whichever one it was, good or bad, it would have made a big difference, don't you think? In the story? As it is, we have the complex nature of criminality to consider. In the crucial moment. That's also very interesting."

"Well," she said, "maybe you flatter yourself. If you really were a criminal, I think you'd have cost me more than three dollars. And some irritation. And my copy of Oak and Ivy, which you'd better bring back, by the way. It's a hard book to find. My father gave it to me. His mother gave it to him. It was signed."

"What can I say? More to regret. I meant to bring it back with Hamlet. But one page has a sort of coffee stain on it. Not coffee, actually. It will be on your doorstep immediately. Such as it is."

"Did you write in it?"

"Hardly at all."

"How can you do that? How can you just write in somebody else's book?"

"In pencil."

"You know what I mean."

"My father said that I never quite learned to distinguish mine and thine. He had the Latin for it."

She laughed. "I love your father. You never talk about your mother."

"Yes. I don't." She was quiet. So he said, "My father thought my deficiencies might be physiological. He hoped they were. He laid them to my difficult birth."

"Predestination."

"Strictly speaking, no."

"Well, I won't follow you into the swamps of Presbyterianism."

"It's all pretty straightforward. Salvation by grace alone. It just begins earlier for us than for other people. In the deep womb of time, in fact. By His secret will and purpose."

"Then why was your father so worried? If it was true, what could he have done about it, anyway?"

"He saw signs of reprobation in me, hard as he tried not to. Reasonably enough. I kept him pretty well supplied with them. Of course, I knew about, you know, those signs. From his sermons. We all did. I may have been listening more carefully than the others. Or listening differently. He who has ears to hear, and so on. It wasn't so much the situation that he hoped to change. He just wanted a less drastic understanding of it. So he comforted himself with my difficult birth, which could not have disfigured my eternal soul, that most elusive thing. However it might have depraved the rest of me." Naked came I from my mother's womb.

"Well," she said, "this is all very interesting. But don't quote Scripture ironically. It makes me very uneasy when you do that."

"I am the Prince of Darkness."

"No, you're a talkative man with holes in his socks."

"You saw them?"

"No, I just knew they were there."

After a minute, he said, "I'll try not to be ironic if you take back what you just said. I am not talkative."

"All right."

"These are special circumstances."

"Yes, they are."

"I hardly say a word for weeks on end. Months."

"I couldn't know that."

"That's because you make me nervous. I talk when I'm nervous. Sometimes."

"You say you're a thief, you say you're disreputable, you say you're the Prince of Darkness, and you object to the word 'talkative.'"

He said, "It's a matter of personal dignity." She laughed.

"It is."

"I understand. I know what you mean. I would feel the same way, I suppose."

"Well, you hardly talk at all. You leave it to me. Then you draw conclusions."

Quiet.

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.