Adam Morris [protagonist of The Glittering Prizes] wants nothing more than to be smart and successful and win the glittering prizes of life. But he also wants to preserve his feisty, joking Jewish resilience, his artistic conscience, his happy marriage, his own identity, his distance. "If there's one boat I never want to be in," he says, "it's the same boat as everyone else." He finds himself thrown together with people at Cambridge University in the 1950's who want pretty much the same things—marriage, money, fame, comfortable accommodations to an imperfect society, nothing revolutionary. Over the next twenty years experience teaches them, some more harshly than others, the deceptions of their desires. Adam must confront, for example, the exploitative ugliness of his first career idea as a media man. (p. 346)

Raphael has learned something of his art from Forster: the satiric treatment of prejudice in Passage to...