Style, for Porter, was a matter of patience; it involved a slow, painstaking distillation of all that she had seen and remembered. In reading her, one has the sense that just beneath the lucid surface of her prose lies a fierce concentration of experience, salvaged from an unusually peripatetic life yet so thoroughly pondered, plumbed, and assimilated that it renders up the exact quintessence of a long vanished moment with startled urgency.
Precisely.
I agree -- one of my all-time favorite writers. I like "Noon Wine," which this critic says is her best work, but the one I most liked to teach was "Old Mortality." Paired with "Pale Horse, Pale Rider," which is its sequel. The latter is one of the few works of literature which treats the 1918 flu epidemic. She survived it, but it turned her hair white.
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