Though Hardy's Jude the Obscure and Cather's My Ántonia begin with boyhood - Jude is eleven, Jim ten - neither book is remotely for young people. Both writers focus upon the tension between youthful idealism and the less highly colored vision of middle age; both also accord the latter's pragmatism more novelistic interest than the former's energy. Each author explores the gap between what we expect of the world and what we obtain from it, only to close by assuming the impossibility of ever making these ideas equivalences. “Nobody did come, because nobody does”: this is a striking tack away from the high-spirited inventiveness that characterizes so much of fiction-writing, where, of course, the novelist may direct anyone at all to rescue, enlighten, or waylay the protagonist.