Any book written by Marilynne Robinson will sell, and that may be the problem. “The Givenness of Things” is billed as a collection of essays, but it consists preponderantly of discursive half-baked musings. Ms. Robinson prefaces one of her many inchoate ideas by admitting—I suppose in this case to her credit—“My thoughts on the subject have not been entirely formed.”

‘I am a Calvinist,” writes the novelist Marilynne Robinson in her latest collection of essays, “The Givenness of Things.” She has proudly said so on many other occasions and, indeed, has cogently defended John Calvin and his 17th-century English-speaking followers, the Puritans, from the calumnies heaped on them by modern historians. It has never been clear to me, though, exactly what she means by Calvinist. I don’t know Ms. Robinson’s theological convictions—I sometimes find her discussions about God nebulous and confusing—but I suspect her Calvinism is more attitudinal than doctrinal. She admires the man’s achievements and appreciates his approach to theology and learning but only speaks up for distinctively Calvinist doctrines in the vaguest and most circuitous way.

In “The Givenness of Things,” though, she elaborates: “A bookish woman like myself, with a long, quiet life behind her, has few opportunities to shock, even scandalize, and that is part of the appeal of making this claim, I admit. But a disappearingly small part. I really am a Calvinist. And one aspect of Calvin’s thought that appeals to me mightily is the famous work ethic. I work more or less constantly.” What she means has nothing to do with Max Weber’s misguided interpretation of the “Protestant work ethic”; she’s referring instead to Calvin’s insistence that all honest work glorifies God, not just religious or ecclesiastical work, and that therefore the layman may fulfill his calling in the secular realm just as any priest may fulfill his in the church.

In the 17 heretofore unpublished essays included here—all but one titled by a solitary word: “Humanism,” “Decline,” “Fear,” “Reformation,” “Theology” and so on—Ms. Robinson often turns her discussion back to Calvin and Calvinism, frequently with enlightening results. She argues, for instance, that Calvinist theology was so much a part of English culture in the late 17th century, and Shakespeare’s concept of grace so evidently inflected by Calvinism, that it’s folly to assume that Shakespeare and his theater-going audience were averse to Calvinist sensibilities. Nor should we assume the playwright must have been “Catholic” or “Protestant” or “Calvinist” in any static sense, “as if a leaning were an identity, and might not change from year to year, depending on whom one had spoken with lately, or what one had read, or how an argument settled into individual thought or experience.”

It’s an important point, well made. Similarly, in an incisive essay on humanism, she criticizes materialism—“a discipline of exclusive attention to the reality that can be tested by scientists”—by first suggesting that the materialist project “was necessary and very fruitful. The greatest proof of its legitimacy is that it has found its way to its own limits.” Those two sentences alone make the essay worth reading.

Yet for all the intermittent flashes of brilliance throughout the book, “The Givenness of Things” exhibits little evidence of her tireless work ethic. It is, alas, an essentially lazy production. The essays are frequently ambulatory to the point of aimlessness. Ms. Robinson’s chosen topics are highly abstruse and deserve clear reasoning, but she approaches them indirectly, often not making a memorable point at all. Crucial sentences unravel, the author having refused or neglected to word them in a way that makes sense to minds other than her own. One example: “If Jesus’ meaning is that the Christ is greater and other than even the great kings of Israel, it is notable that he makes this argument by rejecting the concept of messianic sonship, despite the attenuated claim made through Joseph in the two genealogies, and for Jesus, though only as he, like Abraham and David, has a place in the sacred history of Israel, or as he is a son of Adam.”

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