Nick Adams

One of the benefits of publishing a book like In Our Time is that the stories and memoirs that center around Nick Adams create a continuing character who imparts to the book some of the merits of a full-length novel. Oneis able to follow the stories like snapshots in an album taken over a period of years and make the leaps from one story to another and connect the stories in one's own imagination. Nick begins as an innocent young boy accompanying his father to the Indian Camp, where the events begin to alter his idealistic view of his father and prod him into thinking about things like birth and death, what they mean and how they relate to each other.

The next glimpse the reader gets of Nick is as an adolescent, going through a painful breakup with his girlfriend, Marjorie, and not really understanding why...