Wild Oats is at one level the archetypal campus novel, with the usual set-pieces (boring lectures, dope and drinking escapades, cheating and cramming), and one outstandingly good episode in which the hero, Billy, attempts to explain 'Dover Beach' to a black fellow-student who has to write an essay on it…. The novel has a fine eye for the absurdities of academe, but because it sees all through the hero Billy, a vulnerable and fantasising freshman, its British counterpart is less The History Man than Larkin's Jill.

On another level Wild Oats is a Jewish family saga with strong echoes of The Graduate and Portnoy's Complaint….

Finally, and perhaps least interestingly, Wild Oats is a love story describing Billy's hopeless pursuit of a former girlfriend, Zizi, and ending with his humiliation. The novel's material might have made a lesser writer smartass or self-pitying, but Epstein has an excellent command...