John Updike said, “Nabokov writes prose the way it should be written: enthusiastically.”

Nigerian author Chigozie Obioma runs with this idea in his essay on colorful writing:

Paul West noted in his essay, “In Praise of Purple Prose,” written around the heyday of minimalism in 1985, that the “minimalist vogue depends on the premise that only an almost invisible style can be sincere, honest, moving, sensitive and so forth, whereas prose that draws attention to itself by being revved up, ample, intense, incandescent or flamboyant turns its back on something almost holy — the human bond with ordinariness.” This rationale, I dare say, misunderstands what art is and what art is meant to do. The essential work of art is to magnify the ordinary, to make that which is banal glorious through artistic exploration. Thus, fiction must be different from reportage; painting from photography. And this difference should be reflected in the language of the work — in its deliberate constructiveness, its measured adornment of thought, and in the arrangement of representative images, so that the fiction about a known world becomes an elevated vision of that world.

He argues that the most remembered and loved novels are those with beautiful, even audacious, prose.

I remember James Joyce using prose purposefully in A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. His flowery language swelled with his theme, drawing attention to select passages in the story.

“It is not, however,,” Obioma explains, “that the ‘less is more’ nugget is wrong, it is that it makes a blanket pronouncement on any writing that tends to make its language artful as taboo.”