From James to Conrad to Forster, the loaded and fateful moral choice has always been the centerpiece of the modern novel. Sometimes, as in Lord Jim, the moment of choice is discrete and fleeting; Jim’s spontaneous flight from the wreck of the Patna is a decision that can never be retracted, and one that will define him—at least to himself—for the rest of his life. Often, though, and this is usually the case in real life, there is not one dramatically wrong choice but a whole serious of squalidly ignoble ones, until the young idealist turns, without having any sense of just where, exactly, he went wrong, into the middle-aged cynic.

This process of moral corruption happens to one degree or another to everyone on earth. It happens to entire generations, with the Sixties advocates of peace, love, and understanding become the Wall Street barons and advertising executives of the Nineties, and even to whole peoples, as Vichy Fr ...

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