The book's central characters, Henry, Jonathan, and David, create a riveting triangle that intensifies the dramatic thrust of the story. Henry is stoic, deliberate, and introspective, traits formed from his patrician New England background and the manner in which his parents have reared him. In contrast, Jonathan is irrepressible and loquacious, and he possesses an amazing optimism in the light of the brutality his extended Jewish family has experienced in Nazi Germany.

Henry and Jonathan are unusually precocious for their sixteen years.

While the questions that engage them are sometimes typically sex and lust, they have mature discussions in which one marvels at the depth of their perceptions. They bandy literary quotations and allusions back and forth with frequency and ease, and their talk is distinguished by Talmudic parables.

While these extemporaneously invented parables are often confusing, and sometimes outright incomprehensible, they do serve...