In part this is because of who he writes about, which is mainly working-class or unemployed people whom other writers tend to ignore or write about as if they were aliens from Mars. Try as they might to get inside their heads, they invariably fail because their experience of them is cursory, which leads to stereotyping or sentimentalisation or, worse, pity. Often one gets the feeling that the divide between the writer and his subject is so wide it is unbridgeable. Such writers, you can't help but feel, would be much happier describing the lives of Amazonian Indians than the kind of folk who probably live only a few blocks away.