How does Al Young make an exciting novel (which he does) [in Ask me Now] out of the stuff we put on appointment calendars? For one thing, the older daughter disappears. Mainly, though, it is Durwood Knight's painful ambivalence towards his bourgeois life that keeps us going. This is the same device that the best bourgeois novels—Buddenbrooks, for instance—employ….

Al Young … does a great job portraying Celia, the older daughter, and Moby, her boyfriend. As in a musical piece their silences are as important as their sounds, and in their silences we can feel the raging teenage hormones. They make believable the family romance syndrome, the adolescent reverie that one's parents are not his real parents.

This is Al Young's fourth and best novel. It is more serious than his third, Sitting Pretty, and more rightly written. It has the quality some playwright recommended for plays...