What is the author's style in The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles?

Paul Bowles' language is simple, unadorned, and uniformly precise throughout the novel. This is interesting, because although Bowles was embraced and idolized by the beat movement of the fifties - Kerouac, Burroughs, Kesey - he is not one of them. He has an ear for poetry and rhythm (Bowles was also a composer) and a merciless understanding of human psychology, but his writing is decidedly mannered and literary. He rarely slips into poetic language, and he never lets his verbiage slip in to the stream-of-consciousness vein, even as Port is slipping free from reality in the end of the second book.