There's an immediacy to ["Wild Oats"] that is lacking in other, more distantly written college novels. The endless round of classes, overdue papers, packages from home that never arrive—they're all here, where usually they'd be skipped over. And most important, the sense of time seems absolutely right. The story begins at Christmas, with some puzzling references to Billy's black eye. It swings back to September and the start of his college year; then it works through the term and up to Christmas again, at which point his black eye is explained. And there are flashbacks, all along, to Billy's childhood and early teens. The result is that Christmas seems to arrive, in this novel, exactly when it arrives in most real-life freshman years: about eight months after September. The rest of the world may rush on; "Wild Oats" hangs in a convincingly college-like vacuum.

There's one glaring...