because she writes things like this:
and this:
and this:
[Once] you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people's, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment - once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognise and do not believe in - what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception. That is what I am looking for when I read a novel; one person's truth as far as it can be rendered through language.
and this:
Writers fail us when that interface is tailored to our needs, when it panders to the generalities of its day, when it offers us a world it knows we will accept having already seen it on the television. Bad writing does nothing, changes nothing, educates no emotions, rewires no inner circuitry - we close its covers with the same metaphysical confidence in the universality of our own interface as we did when we opened it. But great writing - great writing forces you to submit to its vision. You spend the morning reading Chekhov and in the afternoon, walking through your neighbourhood, the world has turned Chekhovian; the waitress in the cafe offers a non- sequitur, a dog dances in the street.
and this:
Readers fail when they allow themselves to believe the old mantra that fiction is the thing you relate to and writers the amenable people you seek out when you want to have your own version of the world confirmed and reinforced. That is certainly one of the many things fiction can do, but it's a conjurer's trick within a far deeper magic.
Marilyn asked a long time ago what I thought constituted good prose, or good style, and I've been thinking about the question for a while. My answer thus far is "observation and surprise" -- observation, that the writer tells the truth as s/he sees it, and it's a human truth one recognizes (if not necessarily relates to immediately); and surprise, in that I have never seen this truth described that way before, and the newness and rightness of it delights me. Ms. Smith's essay here touches on this question of style and others, and is eminently worth reading; many thanks to Monica for pointing it out.