The Day's Vanity, The Night's Remorse

Perfection of the life, perfection of the work: is it an either/or choice? Must a person forswear one to attain the other? Byeford Pritchett wants both. He wants to live a life free of the creator’s angst while turning out a work of art worthy of the name.
For more years than he cares to admit, Bye Pritchett’s worked on his bureaucratic novel. He wants it to show the world that there are “good” bureaucrats—courageous, intelligent, swift to act, ready to cut through red tape—as well as the “bad” bureaucrats the press and public are quick to caricature. As he points out, from the irrigation projects that made Mesopotamia and Egypt mighty empires, to the marvels of the modern world—mach 3 aircraft, mighty dams, space probes—what made them possible was the organization of human effort in and through... bureaucracies.
While he faces the choice, life intervenes: women he can’t seem not to fall in love with, a baby, time running out on his creative efforts.
He wouldn’t keep trying except a chance encounter with Crockett. Crockett’s a man in many ways his antithesis: black to his white, young to his old, shrewd and intelligent in a mixture Bye never gets quite right. Crockett’s just begun a writing career, but, unlike Bye, keeps his priorities attuned to the strategy of his life. He turns out best sellers while Bye never finishes his novel.
Then there is Bye’s alter ego, Honest John, a bum once successful as a prize fighter and later as an independent oil speculator, is betrayed first by brittle hands, then by a wife and partner. In response, he renounces the world. He seems to be showing the third way: don’t face the choice between the perfect life and the perfect creation: turn your back on both. The allure of this “no choice” way compels Bye to opt out of a second fling with bureaucracy and take to the open road.
If initiative and integrity aren’t enough to protect the bureaucrat, the companionship of an ex-boxer isn’t enough to protect the road warrior from predation, exhaustion and time running out.
Bye fights the last battle of his life honoring his alter ego’s dying wish, but in the end it is Crockett, plus Bye’s one-time lover and their daughter, and some quickly recruited strangers, compelled by compassion and admiration, who are Bye’s seconds in his last battle.
The tale of Bye’s last battle is told by several narrators. Like the narrators in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, each observer of Bye’s final days adds a layer of insight and feeling to Bye’s own observations. And each becomes linked to the others in a permanent bond by their own integrity.