When I say that Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson changed how I think about prose, I mean specifically this: before reading it I thought good prose was about precision of description. After reading it I understood that the best prose is about the relationship between consciousness and perception — the way attention moves through the world, what it notices and what it skips.

The novel's two protagonists are young girls being raised in their grandmother's house after their mother's suicide. The older sister, Ruth, is the narrator. Her attention is unusual — she notices things that most narrators would glide over and skips events that most narrators would develop. The result is a text that renders consciousness rather than just recording events.

The water motifs in the book are the most sustained piece of symbolic writing I know. By the final pages, every body of water in the novel has accumulated meaning, and the ending, which involves the lake and the house and the train bridge, releases all of it at once.