There are three main categories of characters in Wonderful Years, Wonderful Years. The first of these is the familiar proletarian cluster centered on Eugene Arbuckle, and includes the hair-dresser, Estelle Stoddard, her sister, Sharon, and their friends. They live in a world of limited horizons, but demonstrate the familiar emotional and moral toughness that Higgins often celebrates. The attempt by prosecutors to pressure Arbuckle into betraying his employer illustrates their vulnerability to external forces; Arbuckle's refusal illustrates their spiritual strength.

Attorneys represent another basic category of Higgins characters. The U.S.

attorneys in Wonderful Years, Wonderful Years are ambitious, but not venal, and they are given to realistic appraisals of themselves and others (Higgins's own legal career included service as an assistant U.S. attorney, the position occupied by William Pratt and then by Donald Murphy in the novel). They acknowledge that the sequence of prosecutions in which...