“So, Professor Pelletier, what do you think is the best novel of the twentieth century?”

At the request of the Enfield College Public Affairs Office, I was giving an interview to The New York Times about the Northbury Center, a research library for the study of American women writers soon to be established at the college. If Dr. Edith Hart’s last will and testament survived family lawsuits, I would someday be director of the center.

Martin Katz, the Times arts reporter, was young and jittery. His dark hair was cut close to his head, his sallow skin pulled tight over flat cheekbones. Although he was slight, and at least two inches shorter than his rigidly disciplined posture suggested he wanted to be, the black polo shirt hugged a buffed torso. “Novel in English, I mean,” he continued, as if he were, of course, intimately familiar with literary work in Urdu and Singhalese. As I considered my response, the journalist flipped a page of his long, skinny notebook and recorded the query. Then he glanced up at me impatiently. Interviewing an Enfield College Assistant Professor about a scholarly research center was not the ambitious Marty Katz’s idea of a cutting-edge assignment. He’d put in his dutiful half hour in my green vinyl office armchair, gotten the tedious academic facts, was concluding the interview with a throwaway question.

Afternoon sunlight spilled through my office windows and across the plush-covered cushions of the window seat, forming a luminous rectangle. The patch of sun crept across floorboards in the direction of Marty’s black-leather running shoes. When it touched his toes, the reporter yanked his feet back toward the safety of the cha...