I began thinking over this list of the six ingredients Professor Van Ghent felt it necessary for a novel to contain in order for it to provide “contiguity” – a nice euphemism for “relevance”- “with modern interests”: death, sex, hunger, war, guilt, God. When I cast around in my memory for a modern novel that would eminently qualify, the first that came to my mind was, for some reason, James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, now so thoroughly forgotten, though it was only a little over twenty years ago that it was the great bestseller of the time and the great movie a little later. It had death; it had sadism; it had hunger – at least it contained great chunks of “social consciousness,” which I suppose is what is meant. It had sex – how thrilled we all were at the daring of the famous copulation scene on the Hawaiian beach! It had war – the attack on Pearl Harbor, no less. Indeed, it combined the last two ingredients in a short sentence of priceless felicity, to which Jane Austen could never have hoped to aspire: “Pearl Harbor made a queasiness in the testicles.”