“That’s the hardest thing to do—to stay with a sentence until it has said what it should say, and then to know when that has been accomplished.”

When I first read “Goodbye, Columbus,” the ending unsettled me. I had no intention of heeding it. I was for marriage, a born ball and chain.

If you’ve been a tourist in Russia you’ve probably visited a “house museum,” one of those great, daft halls of pedantry that strive to preserve the former homes of Russian writers and other luminaries exactly as the luftmenschen kept them. Fidelity…