The novel I've been thinking about most this year is Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, specifically the letter structure. John Ames is writing to his young son — a child who will grow up after Ames is gone — and the letter is the novel. This formal decision has consequences: Ames knows he will not see his son grow up, so everything he writes is addressed to a person he knows but can't fully imagine.

The letter as form creates a specific kind of tenderness. Ames is trying to give his son the most important things he knows before time runs out. He doesn't know which things will matter. He writes about theology and baseball and ordinary light and his father and his grandfather. The ordinary things and the extraordinary things exist at the same level because he doesn't know which will mean most.

I think this is the most honest formal decision in recent American fiction. Everything Ames says matters because none of it is guaranteed to reach.