Until then, one of the many ex-Mr. Jane Fondas runs off his mouth in the Nation...

That opening paragraph sets the tone for the rest: oddly chosen scare quotes, plenty of question marks, and plenty of self-obsession.

Those first-person pronouns are real. Musing upon an old photo of himself, Hayden can't resist claiming, for example, that he's gained a mere ten pounds in the intervening thirty-five years. But Hayden's questions are mostly rhetorical. He still subscribes to the stale Marxist theory he first swallowed whole in his early twenties. As he finds out to his dismay, however, most Vietnamese don't...