SOURCE: Buckeye, Robert. Review of Old Scores, by Nicholas Delbanco. Review of Contemporary Fiction 18, no. 1 (spring 1998): 250-51.

In the following review of Old Scores, Buckeye praises Delbanco's writing as intelligent, compassionate, and well-crafted.

We know the story: the sixties; college; the professor, Paul Ballard, and the student he becomes involved with, Elizabeth Sieverdsen; the brief flaring of their love, its near predictable failure. It was the sixties, after all, and too many mistook indulgence for love. And its sequel: to revisit, with the cold eye of experience and time, that youthful evanescence. Or, even worse, to come together again years later, marked by life, particularly divorce, and think that this time …

It is the story of Old Scores but not the one Nicholas Delbanco tells. Love is either more than we will ever understand or less than, much less than, we desire, but it is everything Paul and...