"Ask Me Tomorrow" is definitely not in the mode of Compton Mackenzie's "Sinister Street" or Fitzgerald's "This Side of Paradise," the two youthful "quest" novels that were so widely imitated in the interwar period. The Cozzens portrait of the writer as a young man is tenderly ironic; the author applies the same objective criteria in looking at himself as he does when looking at others. Incidentally, "Ask Me Tomorrow" is a perfect depiction of the Europe that traveling Americans knew when the dollar was a dollar….

As Cozzens grew older, he "saw the stout, stubborn will … gaining impressive victories." He also came at a later age to realize "how temporary are the patterns and the point one can impose on life." In "By Love Possessed," written when Cozzens was 54, the diminished future that must come to all aging dukes who attempt to control life is a matter for...