The Malcontents

Toward the end of a decade of wandering, Rye Wintercrow sits in an Italian seaside village, pondering whether he has failed or simply changed. The pact made with two friends years ago has altered his life. Their arrangement has borne its sweet--and bitter--fruits, and neither distance nor time nor marriage and divorce has freed any of them from its aftermath. Rye is torn loose from his moorings. What he can have, he does not want, and what he wants, he cannot have. He considers deceit, not as concept, but a presence, weighs the enormous, life-changing distortion, turns it over in his head, prods it the way you do a run-over moccasin. A fiction has pervaded his life, made futile every diversion followed in an attempt to kill his gnawing emptiness. He looks at the woman he’s with. “Do you know I think you’re wonderful?” he asks: that awful question to which the but drops like a stone in the heart.