[David Plante's novel, Slides], uses The Marble Faun as a touchstone, detected as if with radar through the gloom, echoing sometimes firm and sometimes weak responses. One measure of Slides' success is that the words a reader feels bound to use in describing it are those of either Mr Plante or Hawthorne. Sixty-seven brief chapters flash before us a series of 'restless impressions' of five young Americans. None of this little tangled group of adolescents' … is able to stand alone. They survive on each other's doubts and enthusiasms…. A sequence of shots shows them at Walden Pond, in Boston museums, on the Connecticut Turnpike, in bed, in kitchens, in toilets, on boats, in Rome, in restaurants and ruins, talking and listening to talk about themselves. It is a book with very few hard facts about the characters—no surnames, incomes, ambitions, shapes or sizes. But out of 'an...