A sad day for his family, his country, and for the literary world. I think his novel, Miss Jane is a masterpiece. Here’s what I said about it (on Amazon) in September 2019.

Do you remember that scene in the movie version of The English Patient where Katherine lists for the sake of archeologists (and supporters of their project, all of them guys) gathered around a fire the several varieties of love? Romantic, filial, etc. Well, this novel, set in the deep, deep American south during the Great Depression years does much more than list them. It creates a couple of the most extraordinary and unlikely sort: a curious country doctor and his patient, the latter a sensitive and gentle young woman suffering from an extremely disabling case of fecal incontinence (owing to congenital underdevelopment of the partition between rectum and vagina) whom the doctor himself had seen into this world in an at-home birthing. And the love that evolves between doctor and patient is a many-kinds thing; so many it’s breathtaking. (The one kind missing is sexual, of course, yet eros is there by implication as she, the patient grows older—by which time the doctor’s wife has died.) Nor does the novelist omit corresponding forms of hatred in the surround of this central couple. I could go on—the merging of natural and social environments in a frenzy of sensual (tactile, visual, auditory, olfactory) detail is a marvel. But I won’t. Don’t miss out: read this book!