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, which even its author admits is unreadable.”
    Author admitteth no such thing. Author happeneth to believe the novel enormously readable, as well as enormous in other respects. Complex? Well, yes. Complicated? For sure. Designed and constructed with a certain rigor? You bet: As in pro football and the knitting of argyle socks, rigor in novel-writing is the zest of complexity; the aim is to bring it off with brio, panache, even grace—“passionate virtuosity,” I’ve heard it called—never dropping the ball or a stitch. Not for every taste, no doubt; but in the author’s opinion (15 years now after the novel’s first publication) there is in LETTERS sufficient humor, range of passions, historical seriousness, and bravura theater to make it a rousing read despite its elegant construction, if “despite” is how it need be.
    But let’s hope it needn’t.
    Â 
    HERE’S HOW THE thing came to be written:
    â€¢ Although its action takes place through seven months of 1969 (seven years before the U.S. Bicentennial, which some Americans at the decade’s turn, myself included, were beginning to note the approach of), it was in 1973 that the novel itself moved from accumulated project-notes to the front burner of my concerns. That’s the year when the American 1960s really ended: with the Israeli/Egyptian Yom Kippur War and the consequent Arab oil embargo; with the humiliating wind-down of our Vietnamese misadventure, which had fueled and focused countercultural protest; with the leveling off and subsequent erosion of
U.S. economic prosperity, which had grown with all but uninterrupted vigor through the generation since Pearl Harbor—an erosion that, for the Baby Boomers at least, continues yet. Not a bad benchmark, in short, ’73, for the beginning of the end of “the American Century,” as under the Nixon/Kissinger administration the nation ground unenthusiastically toward its 200th birthday—an event that I’d had my eye on, novel-wise, for some while already. This for the reason that
    â€¢ I myself had passed Dante’s mezzo del cammin di nostra vita and begun the second half of my projectible life-span, actuarially and otherwise. A 20-year first marriage had ended in divorce, and at age 40 I had married again (the second union, as of this writing, happily older than its predecessor and going for the distance). In those first 20 years of adulthood I had sired and co-parented three children, and by 1973 was managing them through college. I had contrived to ascend the American academic ladder from teaching-assistantship to endowed-professorship while at the same time writing and publishing my first half-dozen volumes of fiction, and my literary offspring had earned some degree of critical notice—sometimes hedged, like the quotes above. Indeed, the first and fifth of them had been bridesmaid finalists for the National Book Award in fiction, and the sixth a bigamous bride: A divided jury named Chimera co-winner of the 1973 prize.
    â€¢ All things considered, a not-inappropriate time to take stock, as the USA was warming up to do—perhaps via a Bicentennial novel that would concern itself with (and be the first fruit of) second halves and “second revolutions,” in my country’s history 4 as well as in my personal and professional life. What I aimed to do—when by 1973 those aims had clarified themselves—was write a seventh novel that would address these bicentenary, second-revolutionary themes and at the same time be a sequel to all six of its forerunners, carrying representative characters from each into the second cycles of their several stories—without, however, requiring that its readers be familiar with those earlier works.
    â€¢ Moreover, two decades of reading, writing, and teaching literature had bemused me with the three main senses of our English word letters , to wit:
    1. Alphabetical characters,