[David Plante's novel, Slides], uses The Marble Faun as a touchstone, detected as if with radar through the gloom, echoing sometimes firm and sometimes weak responses. One measure of Slides' success is that the words a reader feels bound to use in describing it are those of either Mr Plante or Hawthorne. Sixty-seven brief chapters flash before us a series of 'restless impressions' of five young Americans. None of this little tangled group of adolescents' … is able to stand alone. They survive on each other's doubts and enthusiasms…. A sequence of shots shows them at Walden Pond, in Boston museums, on the Connecticut Turnpike, in bed, in kitchens, in toilets, on boats, in Rome, in restaurants and ruins, talking and listening to talk about themselves. It is a book with very few hard facts about the characters—no surnames, incomes, ambitions, shapes or sizes. But out of 'an atmosphere of refracting, darting, crisscossing influences', Mr Plante conjures a very vivid reality. His three young men and two young women are immensely vulnerable, and as the slides flicker on, and the crisp New England air gives way to the rich gloom of Italy, they seem to consume one another…. They seem to gnaw at each other with their enigmatic, parasitic dissatisfaction, and their final consummation is just….

Yet Mr Plante's 'elaboration obliqueness' is by no means fanciful. In a time when many books seem full of vicarious lechery, his descriptions of sexual activity possess an honest and moving precision. Slides has the further effect of sending one to The Marble Faun with a new set of demands—makes it possible, in fact, to reread it. I would conclude that, having made such mysterious and skilful use of Henry James in his first book, and of Hawthorne in this, Mr Plante seems fully equipped to achieve great magic with Mr Plante.