And what is her own reading? Again, Robinson appears to reveal her hand on this point quickly, yet in other ways she holds her cards close to her chest. She insists early and often that in story after story Genesis makes manifest the faithfulness of God amid the fallenness of humanity. Her book proceeds through Genesis from beginning to end, emphasizing this point in narrative after narrative. One almost gets the impression that Robinson treats each story as a new case study, like a new facet of the diamond of God’s faithfulness. In this vein Robinson’s commentary on the early stories of Genesis reads almost like stream-of-consciousness musings or journal entries, a sense only heightened by the lack of any chapter divisions or page breaks all the way through. This makes the beginning of the book difficult to navigate: in the first sixty pages, Robinson moves from preliminary comments, to creation, to Abraham’s dark dream of his descendants’ slavery in Egypt, to Babylonian epic, to human culpability, to Abraham and Melchizedek, back to the two creation stories, on to the flood, and back to Cain and Abel, in that order. Again, without chapters or even page breaks, the sequence is dizzying, even if ultimately justifiable. Finally, eighty pages in, she begins a steady treatment of the story of Abram and Sarai, and from here Reading Genesis continues clearly and steadily through the rest of Genesis.

Once on this track, however, leave it to Robinson, herself an expert crafter of narrative, to let a deeper interpretation of Genesis as narrative unfurl as the narrative of Genesis itself unfolds. Robinson’s Reading Genesis mirrors Genesis in this regard, slowly revealing its thematic interconnections and overall sense of direction. Her careful attention to detail, stellar imagination, and persistent attention to the grace of God (familiar to any reader of her fiction) offer many moments in the book to savor. The central theme that emerges, though, is not simply the faithfulness of God amid human sinfulness, but also the providence of God in creation. This is where her narrative approach to Genesis and superb attention to character development among its central actors really pays off. Very early in the book, Robinson comments that, “Our human nature as fallen and our human nature as divine have a dynamic, asymptotic relation with each other, meeting at infinity, perhaps.” This paves the way for her insight near the end of the work that, according to Genesis, “the earthly and the providential are separate things only in theory.” As she says, “the text anticipates a thousand questions about this view of human life, in which for most of us little seems like providence.” Robinson proves herself an excellent guide through a number of these thousand questions, as well as demonstrating just how often they arise. They are present amid her creative speculation on Rebekah’s decades-long disappointment over Isaac, and present again amid her convincing description of Jacob’s decades-long anguish over his dishonest sons.

Occasionally, I’m inclined to disagree with Robinson’s take on this or that story. Is the Enoch of Genesis 4:17-18 really the Enoch who walked with God in 5:22? Is the Lamech of chapter 4 also the father of Noah? I’m inclined to answer no to both questions, whereas Robinson suggests yes. How are we to evaluate Joseph’s oversight of the famine in Egypt? Did he save the world or unwittingly and unwisely create the conditions for Israel’s slavery in Egypt? While appreciating Robinson’s insights on these questions, I remain undecided in my own interpretation of that thorny problem. Overall, however, this reader can’t help but delight as one of our time’s greatest living authors explores some of the greatest literature of all time, and all toward the end of magnifying God’s grace, faithfulness, and benign intentions for creation and humanity.