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I sit in John and Katherine Paterson's cottage living room on a day whose tones are as perfect as a bell. A corridor of evergreens leads down to the lake, and the water reflects a sky that holds only a single cloud for accent. We watch and wait for a white sailboat to come by, and it does, as if it knew that it alone was needed to complete the picture. I listen for my five children whom John and my wife have taken down to the beach; the sixth lies asleep in the next room, having had his fill of driving up and down and up and down the long slopes that led us there, thank you.

Katherine is just back from a retreat, an annual one that she would never miss, and is beginning to think about the conference up in Maine in a couple of weeks. Tomorrow she will be in Boston, where she will meet with a group of Newbery and Caldecott Award winners to work on a citywide literacy project. We sit down, and one of her editors calls. Then another. I look at the stacks of books around me and pick up The Seed People while I wait. Katherine is reading through these in her work as chair for the National Book Award. When she comes back, she waves her hands and gives an exasperated laugh, long and deep. "I am," she explains, "on vacation this month."

I am reluctant to turn on the tape recorder, to establish the protocol and formality of the literary interview. Katherine is the neighbor next door, the friend who gladdens the day, the favorite aunt who wants to know—who truly wants to know—how it is with you. You would no more tape her laughter and easy talk than you would theirs. Later, when we are all swimming in the lake, I have to keep reminding myself that this is the winner of a couple of National Book Awards and more Newbery Medals and honors than you can shake a stick at. As more people come down to the water, I wonder whether they know, whether this prophet is honored in Nazareth. My son, who is eight and always hungry, wonders if the prophet has anything to eat back up at the house.

So, reluctant to begin, I turn instead to what was then the most recent of her novels, Jip: His Story (1996). The structuring of the title suggests his singular experience, but really it is a novel that asserts the impossibility of singular experience—it is a novel that pictures the expanding rings of charity, rings that grow out of the previous novel, Lyddie (1991). Jip is not a sequel to Lyddie—"I don't write sequels!" Katherine asserts—but the rings of charity that move out into Jip certainly began with Lyddie.

When Lyddie is abandoned by her father and sent away by a mother who maddens and finally dies, she resolves that she will keep her family together on their farm, and she devotes all of her energies to the Lowell textile mills so that she may earn the money for this hope. But as one by one everything that she loves is taken away—her brother is adopted by wealthy folks, her sister cannot live in Lowell because of the racking coughs that assail her, her friends are driven away by manufactured scandal, and finally even she is blackballed and turned away from the mills—Lyddie must decide how she will deal with loss. For a moment, she has the ripe opportunity to pay the world back: She may turn in an escaped slave and recover the needed money. But she does not, and in fact helps Ezekial Freeman to escape north. So begins the first circle of charity—and it makes no difference that that charity is at first reluctant.

In Jip: His Story, Jip throws more than one circle of his own. His responses to the other inmates of the Vermont poorhouse in which he lives are responses of an easy, unaffected kindness. When it is discovered that he is the son of a slave and thus a slave himself, only one of the inmates—the lunatic Put—will return his kindnesses and help him. But Put's help is impotent, and it is the Teacher, Lyddie, who has learned the lessons of charity, who offers yet another circle: She will swear that Jip is her illegitimate son, thus saving him while destroying her own career and reputation.

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