He was unusually good at listening to our questions, engaging them on their own terms, and delivering prose quality responses extemporaneously in speech.
For he has to deliver Nabokovian prose as if to say it was the most normal and sensible way of speaking the English language yet invented.
It's delivered in prose that is effortlessly stylish, exact and always trembling on the edge of great humour.
A poker smashing down on a withered hand or a barbecued limb, delivered in prose so polished it would impress judges, if they would only deign to look.
Each is a shocking testimony, probing the line between witness and participant, innocence and culpability, and delivered in prose aspiring to Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry stories in which the writer's anecdotal élan carries moments of real brutality.
Theroux delivers richer prose than Michener, subtler insights and slyer dilemmas, but he resembles the late mass-market master of narrative geography by treating societies as his true protagonists while giving his characters (in his novels, at least) the auxiliary role of inciting, observing or acting out the conflicts latent in their surrounding cultures.
Since this is Richard Yates, the promise turns out to be empty and the girls' dreams flutter and die, but between that Easter and the springtime decades later when the book ends, lies a heartbreaking story delivered in prose as exquisite as it is seemingly offhand.
The arguments are cleanly delivered; the prose is crisp and alive.
And Ms. Rice, when inspired, can deliver hypnotic, incantatory prose that celebrates Yeshua's ascension.
At evening's end Professor Bloom will deliver a brief prose epilogue in the spirit of Shakespeare.
Since the age of the Internet had not arrived, he was under no pressure to deliver snippets of prose on the fly as events were happening.
