We are all—even young lovers—affected by our own struggle for survival and by our world's assumptions regarding what is correct and successful. Not one of us, not even a heroine, escapes the constraint.

As for Frank—who cares?

Pride and Prejudice is realistic, questioning, and sometimes flippant, even cynical--but Arcadia is always just about to happen. Some very tough truths are told in this novel in which everyone goes wrong, but our hearts are light as we read because we are never far from the land of green promise.

...the comic inadequacy of consciousness trying to make terms with the rest of everything that is.

It is his vegetable ambition never to stir.