Letters

 I was musing, eating three tacos, good but expensive, as is everything these days, about what author, or at least what author I am familiar with, would render the modern world best at the moment. F Scott Fitzgerald comes to mind with his depiction of the Jazz Age, that bubbly time full of social activity and unrest. It would be hard to imagine what sort of romance he might superimpose on today's polemic environment--some woke version of the Daisy-Tom romance, perhaps with an added nonbinary transgender figure. Nabokov might be a candidate as today's chronicler. But with his loquacious wit and wordplay, he might be too internalized, and indeed, possibly the more quiet 1950s was a better backdrop for his narration, the campuses of today are nothing like the genteel quiet, and easily scoffable campuses of Lolita or Pnin. But he certainly knew Ithaca, lately in the news a nice setting for a contemporary story. What would Philip Roth do with these times? His stories seem to show ch