The novel that most accurately represents the experience of being very tired is, unexpectedly, Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. Not because the characters are tired — though they are — but because the prose enacts a kind of exhausted attention that I recognize from my own worst periods. Sentences that keep going because stopping would require a decision.

Robinson wrote it at a single draft, or so the story goes, over a summer. I believe this because the voice is too consistent to have been revised into coherence. It arrived whole or it arrived as nothing.

The book is about two sisters in the Pacific Northwest after their mother's death, raised by a sequence of reluctant guardians. It is about loss and vagrancy and what it means to choose a kind of life that the town around you considers abandonment. I have read it five times. Each time, I find something new about the way the water is described.