Few literary tricks can be more annoying to a reader—to this reader, at least—than to find the author pleading for sympathy for a character when that character is clearly dreadful, hopeless, impossible to cherish. Think of the legions of virginal young damsels who bloom in the lush gardens of 19th-century English fiction. How our feelings are played upon! How we are hectored to love them!…

Whatever else has happened to fiction these past fifty years, we can be grateful for the passing of the Sweet Young Thing. But the same kind of novelistic sleight-of-hand is still going on, with the same unhappy effect: witness [Saul Bellow's] Herzog and, much lower down the same ladder, Take Me Where the Good Times Are.

In Robert Cormier's book, it is an old man, poor and alone—the 20th-century equivalent of the Young Girl apparently will be the Senior Citizen...