On its publication in the spring of 1980, reviews, laudatory, were also personal, even intimate; readers were drawn fast into the novel, experiencing shocks and revelations along with the characters. In The New York Times, John Leonard wrote that Transit’s “business is to break the heart” and confessed that “although I suppose that such emotions are inappropriate to criticism, I finished the book angry and in tears.” The affect was itself a function of the writing: “No matter the object—a feeling, a face, a room, the weather—it is stripped of its layers of paint, its clots of words, down to the original wood; oil is applied; grain appears, and a glow. Every epigram and apostrophe is earned. A powerful intelligence is playing with a knife. It is an intelligence that refuses to be deflected by ironies; irony isn’t good enough.” The allusive prose that had beguiled readers of the early novels was now fully formed, strikingly not of its time, but drawing, somehow, on the long traditions of literature. Anthony Hecht spelled this out in his formal introduction to her in a 1983 Library of Congress series of public talks on poetry. Shirley Hazzard was, he said,

A writer of fiction in a series of programs usually devoted to poets. But by dint of the craft of her work, the lyric movement, the voluminous literary resonance of her beautiful and meticulous prose, she very evidently elects to keep such company. For she brings to her writing that wealth of literary tradition that poets have always conceived to be their special heritage, but which only a very few novelists have tried to make use of … What distinguishes her writing above all is that she takes her words seriously, as very few novelists do these days. Her words recur within her text like lyric refrains, each repetition bearing a new increment of meaning. Yeats could do that sort of thing, and Shakespeare, and Joyce. It is more than mere technique; it is knowing the reach and dimension, the metric weight of each simple, innocent word, and using that knowledge to advantage.