There is something untimely about this novel, above all stylistically. In 2010, Michael Gorra wrote that it “would have seemed old-fashioned in 1980,” when it was published, a view echoed by other readers who, in the decades that followed its publication, seem often to have been delaying, holding off, even resisting its appeal. Geoff Dyer wrote that he had finally turned to read Transit twenty years after buying a copy and was struck then by the sense that he was reading it “at the perfect moment,” that he had been in fact “destined to read the book at this moment,” his experience chiming with the novel’s deep investment in destiny. David Miller, a few years later, wrote of his irritation at how long it had taken him to read the novel and that having begun, “I was ensnared, like having been bitten by a puppy or kitten that wouldn’t let go until it tasted blood.” Another decade on, Michelle de Kretser remembered that in 1980 she had wondered, “Why the fuss?” She had read the novel and “forgot about it for twenty years”; then, opening it again, “the sensation came, like a blow to the breastbone,” from the first page, “the shock of the great.”