His cold restraint, often criticized, is the source of his tremendous power as a novelist. His themes—displacement, power, the value of literature, the fictive possibilities of personal history—are worked and reworked into novels which shine hard like diamonds, unbreakable.

“I thought I should live closer, but I didn’t want to be on the same piece of land as my mother…She was a hard person to get on with, and not a very good mother. In all our lives with her, my brother and I never got a hug or a kiss. She was that kind of mother, and my father was anywhere but at home. At the same time we were raised with a sense of duty, and duty to me is as important as love, if not more important. My book, An Indecent Obsession was about duty.”