City of the Mind is one of a handful of Lively's novels possessing a male protagonist, the others being Treasures of Time (1979), According to Mark (1984), and Cleopatra's Sister (1993). Like his counterparts in these novels, Matthew Halland is a complex, fully human character who appealingly blends sensitivity and high-mindedness with full-blooded maleness (although holding romantic, idealistic ideas about love and sex, he cannot help but at times give in to the randiness that besets him now that he lacks a steady sexual partner). Matthew also serves, as do many of Lively's both male and female protagonists, as the spokesperson for the author's ideas about history, time, and reality. Like Lively, he has a deep respect for the past but is distressed by the contemporary fad of turning it into something picturesque and quaint. And he is given to frequent Livelyesque insights concerning the protean nature of reality and the...