The author Edward Upward, a survivor of the generation of Wystan Hugh Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and Stephen Spender, turned 101 years old last September. In "Journey to the Edge," published in 1938, he tells the powerful story of an English tutor who is taken by his employer to a horse race in the mid-1930s. He meets a few people. Almost nothing happens. But Upward's novel is strong because the young man teeters on the brink of madness, and the narrator manages to involve us in this delicate balance. In the tutor's fantasies, themes of the time play a role, such as fascism, the looming threat of war, and social conflicts. All of this seems exaggerated. On the other hand, the exaggeration frighteningly captures the mood of the time; the world of those pre-war years is characterized and indeed exposed.