I experience an intense pleasure every time I open Lewis Warsh's novel A Free Man. I become deeply involved, not so much with the story as with the book itself, something I haven't experienced since reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night. It's rare to be so enmeshed in reading a novel, and rarer still in one whose sentences you covet, whose words are like precious stones. In the midst of Warsh's impressive grammatical precision and syntactical...