This curious book, a series of highly personal essays, at once fascinating and frustrating, contains moments of rare beauty. For example, in a remarkable exegesis of a Gerard Manley Hopkins sonnet, Ellen Handler Spitz writes, “I have cherished this sonnet since the days when, bent over our scratched wooden desks, pushing the long hair out of our solemn eyes, identifying ourselves as a secret suffering sect, my schoolmates and I passed agonized notes back and forth in French, even Latin—questioning, always questioning, with profound sincerity, never a touch of irony, the eternal verities” (p. 138).

The writing is poetic. A master of the compound, complex sentence, Spitz's paragraph-long sentences may wind along as many as eight lines (p. 18). The chapters are not numbered and bear such