For 30-odd pages, Wiley and his love, whose name is Orra, stroke away in this manner. The story line that emerges concerns Wiley's ambition to bring Orra to sexual climax, an occurrence that eventually comes about along the following lines:

Something pulled her over; and something gave in; and all three pairs of wings began to beat [Wiley has proposed this metaphor earlier in the proceedings]: she was the center and the source and the victim of a storm of wing beats; we were at the top of the world; the huge bird of God's body in us hovered; the great miracle pounded on her back, pounded around us; she was straining and agonized and distraught, estranged within this corporeal-incorporeal thing, this angelic other avatar, this other substance of herself...

Prospective Harvard novelists could profit from their forebears' achievement by taking close note of one love scene that breaks the pattern. It is a scene in which a Harvard man and a Radcliffe woman enjoy each other's company far from any library, with no preliminary required reading, and without a play-by-play narration of every general-education epiphany. Moreover, as it happens, it is far and away the most celebrated and financially successful love scene in the history of Harvard fiction:

I threw down my book and crossed the room to where she was sitting.

"Jenny, for Christ's sake, how can I read John Stuart Mill when every single second I'm dying to make love to you?"

She screwed up her brow and frowned.

"Oh Oliver, wouldin please?"

I was crouching by her chair. She looked back into her book.

"Jenny--"

She closed her book softly, put it down, then placed her hands on the sides of my neck.

"Oliver--wouldin please."

It all happened at once. Everything.