"Who was I when I wasn�t looking"

Harvard Square: A Novel, is narrated by an Egyptian Jew from Alexandria. He is 26, already a looser and a failed graduate student. He has a second chance at passing his comprehensives and pursuing his doctorate at Harvard University. It is 1977 and the narrator, never named, tells his tale of loneliness and failure, from the position of an observer, who has distanced himself from others and receded into a cynicism to allow for justifications of his demise if he fails his exams again in January 1978.