I'm still thinking about the intimate 3rd person narrator. It felt like such a revelation to realize what Tobias Wolff was doing in The Barracks Thief — maybe because I always write in 1st person. But when I started thinking about other intimate 3rd person narrators, I had no trouble coming up with examples I love, including Hemingway's Nick Adams stories and a novel I've read repeatedly since I was about 13 years old, Margaret Laurence's The Diviners.

It was the first adult book I read. My cousin, who was in his early 20's, sent it to me. I have no idea why — I think he had just read it and liked it, and he believed I would like it.  I don't think he considered how young as I was — a good thing for me.

The book absolutely grabbed my attention early when it described the deaths of Morag's parents, and how she went to live with Christie and Prin Logan. Here's the intimate 3rd person narrator describing Morag as a 5-year-old kid meeting her new guardians:

Smelly. The house is smelly.  It smells like pee or something, but not like a barn.  Worse.  Morag sits still on the kitchen chair.  The two people are looking at her.  Let them look.  She will not let on.  She will not say anything....

"You want to see your room, Morag?" the woman says.

She nods.  They mount the stairs, the woman going very slow because fat. 
The room is hers, this one?  A thin bed, a green dresser, a window with a
(oh—ripped, shame on them) lace curtain.  A little room.  You might be safe
in a place like that, if it was really yours.  If they meant it.

So the intimacy of that voice narrating Morag's childhood made me trust it, pulled me in.  But the book isn't all written in in intimate 3rd person — parts of it feature an italicized 1st person adult narrator looking back on her life.  I know I skipped over some parts of the book when I was a kid — some of the more adult passages didn't really make sense to me with their expressions of loss. That didn't make me like the book any less. I just chose the parts I understood.

As I got older, I read these "adult" sections of the book and came to love the novel in a new way.  As an adult, as a 1st person narrator, Morag is as blunt and honest as the 3rd person intimate narrator is.  For instance, early on in the novel (page 11) the adult Morag is thinking of the kind of child she was, wondering if her stubborness and willingness to accept consequences — being "bloody-minded" she calls it — was something she inherited from her parents, from her "sad and stern" Scottish father.  She says:

Does that say anything about my parents, or only that I was born bloody-minded? I WAS born bloody-minded.  It's cost me.  I've paid through the nose.  As they say.  Also, one might add, through the head, heart and cunt.

Looking at that now, it's no wonder to me that I wrote Swimming Sweet Arrow, or my new novel, Thief. I write books about women who follow their wants and live with their choices.  There's always a price to be paid for that, and women do pay with their heads and hearts and cunts.

I think if I had to pick the single most important book to me as a writer, it would be The Diviners.