["Winter Journey"] takes its title from the Schubert song cycle "Die Winterreise" and recounts the adventures, largely emotional, of an American divorcée, Nancy Mitchell, and her seventeen-year-old son, Carey, a promising concert pianist, during a season in Rome in the early nineteen-fifties. It opens and progresses with every expectation of accomplishment. Mr. Broughton is a writer of considerable style and lyrical ardor. He is also himself a trained pianist (Juilliard), and thus is able to depict the inner responses of a musician, and he convincingly remembers what it is like to be seventeen…. There is much talk, much examining of one another's love affairs, much examining of one's innermost feelings, some diverting sightseeing. And then it all resolves … and dissolves in a sigh and a shrug of romantic rue.

"Briefly Noted: 'Winter Journey'," in The New Yorker (© 1980 by The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.), Vol. LVI, No. 1, February...