[This] is what it is like to read "Winter Journey": It is the mid-1950's, and your assigned college roommate (if you're male) or your weekend blind date (if you're female), who at first has been enormously attractive; polite and even shy, but slightly intimidating in his restrained knowledgeability, decides you are sensitive and trustworthy, and for the rest of the night, over several cups of coffee, tells you his life story richly, seriously and intimately.

It is the story of Carey Mitchell, a teen-age Philadelphia boy whose mother leaves his father, who had a subtle problem with the students at the Main Line women's college where he teaches drama—it's not just steamy fantasy and it's not just cold lechery, but an intelligently depicted combination of the two. The mother takes the boy with her to her new job as a secretary in the American Embassy in...