Over in the New York Times's Reading Room, a confab of extremely bright people (including Margot Livesy and Alan Gurganis) are talking about one of my favorite books of all times: the endlessly rich and aching Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson.

I have been following these posts earnestly because each of the panelists is brilliant and has been able to articulate better than I could why the novel is so vivid and artful. The first time I read it I was in college, and the reading was an earth-shattering event: I walked around for what seemed like months with my vision of the world changed. I found the book devastatingly wise and sad back then, and with subsequent reads have only found more to love about it. I think that's the true mark of major literature--when you come back to it at different stages of your life, you will be able to see more layers, through which you will be able to see yourself and the world around you more clearly. Lolita and Middlemarch are two other books I feel this way about.

Because the panelists were so persuasive, I read the novel again, finding time when I actually really didn't have any to spare. I fell in love again, this time with what I see as Robinson's project in the book. Through the blog, I was introduced to an article Robinson had written for the New York Times in 1985, called "Writers and the Nostalgic Fallacy" (why don't essays as philosophical and brilliant as this one appear in newspapers nowadays?); what struck me at the time was a line when Robinson said, "to find a new language for a new kind of novel is a thing I have long aspired to do." Although Robinson states that she failed to do so, I'd argue otherwise. Housekeeping has the resonance, timelessness, and beauty of a fairy tale, but is modern; Fingerbone is a magical world, but Robinson writes without any of the conceits of magical realism. Everything in the book is real and can exist within the rules of regular physical life--and yet, somehow, the tone is deeply magical.

I've been trying to come up with a name for what she does so well in this book, which is to describe something so perfectly and precisely that it takes on an element of absolute strangeness. The only think I can come up with is "magical precision," and though that's hardly adequate, maybe the idea alone is enough to teach me as a reader how to pay more attention and as a writer how to (attempt to) reach the resonant depths that Robinson does in this slender book.