I am glad that Princeton has on its faculty some well-known novelists, like Joyce Carol Oates and Jeffrey Eugenides. But to be frank, I have found the books by them that I have tried to read totally unreadable. Oates has one novel about strange events in Princeton about 100 years ago; it contains some interesting negative views of Woodrow Wilson and lots of mystical nonsense, but its value escapes me. As for the gender confusions of Eugenides, I can only wonder if even at this late stage in our moral transformations it can really have any worth.

Sorry.

Norman Ravitch *62
Savannah, Ga.