[So] good is The Professor's Daughter, so intellectually engaging and compelling, that one must ask why this is not a novel of major importance instead of merely first-rate entertainment.

It can be argued that its ending is contrived—contrived, moreover, to give aid and comfort to middle-class, anti-revolutionary values. And there is justification for such a view: The domestic settlements that end it do seem trivial in the light of the questions it has raised; thus the ending does seem forced.

The trouble, however, does not lie in the ending itself, but in the fact that Mr. Read has staged his drama of social issues in a hermetic setting, as if he believed that issues that were once fought over in street warfare behind barricades could be solved in the drawing rooms of Brattle Street and the crash pads of Berkeley….

But what does tend to trivialize this...