Pain and perfection: novelist Allan Gurganus recalls writer Heather Lewis, who died May 4 in New York.

It is cruelly typical: Suicide will probably bring Heather Lewis (House Rules, The Second Suspect, and the unpublished Notice) the huge readership that her mere life always deserved. I first met her when she was a shy, beguiling student at Sarah Lawrence. She stood there, lean, boyish, contained, quick to rush toward offered warmth, quicker to then suspect its motives. Since she was a victim of childhood incest, some essential element of her Self had been permanently lanced. And yet from such immense early pain she rescued an essentialized prose of the greatest beauty: pure narrative protein.

While a teenager, Heather earned money as a show rider of thoroughbred homes [the subject of her first novel, House Rules]. She must've looked amazing in jodhpurs, a crop tucked under one arm. On and off the page, Heather never forgot how to get 2,000 pounds over a picket fence. Up the whole chapter or creature would heave, all at once in a smear of perfection. As if the beast had suddenly decided to do just that, just now and simply for the hell of it.

Heather Lewis, for 41 years, subjected chaos to her own course of brilliant dressage. True, in the end the mess, the pain climbed up on her, it wound up riding, driving. But Heather's having surmounted, then aimed it for so long remains a dazzling feat of will, control, blind faith.

And now watch her fiction outgallop us all. "Go, girl!"