[For] Marilynne Robinson in Housekeeping, style is metaphor: the identification of life with and through unusual language. The elegant, measured prose of Housekeeping transforms a year in the life of two small-town teenage girls into a profound meditation on loss, transiency, and the shelters we use for protection. The voice Robinson gives her narrator Ruth … is original, very much the sound of Ruth's inwardness, yet some comparisons help describe the qualities of this voice and the appeal of the book. Housekeeping has the sibling intimacy and domestic observation of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, the beauty of threatening landscape and deep dream in John Hawkes's Beetle Leg, and the combination of quiet and excited sensibility found in Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Best of all, though, is a distinctive rhythm—a matter of pace, syntax, and tone—that cannot be described but lingers after Robinson's equally wonderful...