Fate Knocks at the Door

A ship's cook who has wandered the East inherits his captain's fortune on a Spanish-American island, comes to New York, and finds he does not want it — and a painter, a mystic and a dying man complicate the giving of it away. Comfort served in the Spanish-American War and reported the fighting in the Philippines and the Russo-Japanese War before he was thirty, came home unable to stomach any of it, and turned to novels about how a man might live instead. The intensity is the point; there is nothing else quite like him. Fifty-five plates by painters including Walter Sickert and Vilhelm Hammershøi trace the sea, the music hall and the quiet rooms of a life at home, the world this novel's wanderer cannot settle into.