At first glance Fonthill seems to be a conservative big/little town of the pre-Repeal 1930s. Its shuttered houses are thick with sinful cigarette smoke; its inhabitants drink medicinally and gossip tirelessly. The queen bee of this sexually freighted hive is the faded and fallen beauty Adele Bevington. For it is Adele who is the final arbiter of Fonthill's manners and morals, and this in spite of the fact that she is unequivocally a woman with a past, one who goes to the movies in the afternoon and receives gentlemen callers at all hours of the night.

Adele is seeking the son she never knew, a quest that will enmesh each of her loyal subjects: the beautiful but impecunious Elaine Cottrell, whose two sons will vie for the favors—real and imagined—of their fabulously bejeweled monarch; the eavesdropping Widow Hughes, who is mostly dotty; Val Dougherty, an ice-man who pays dearly for his forbidden love; and Keith Gresham, who has a great capacity for love but has lost the means of its attainment in the trenches of the Great War. It is Keith who will call into question Adele's pursuit of her heart's desire.

Taken as one, these wondrous characters are drawn into a universal tangle, one of long dormant or precocious promiscuity, of skewed proprieties and refreshingly boisterous laughter. It is a measure of James Purdy's art that he has found a universality among this singular lot; in his equally singular fashion, Mr. Purdy has once again moved us—even against our wills—to look inward.

—From the first-edition dust jacket.