What does a man really know about love?
This is the story of three men - very different from each other in age, background, and sensibility - who find themselves in love with the same woman. It is the story of that woman, Francine Widmer, twenty-seven, beautiful, intelligent, resourceful, who insists on running her own life.
Suddenly, control of Francine's life is ripped apart when a gas-station owner rapes her. Francine finds that the doctors and the police are indifferent to the enormity of rape. How, then, do the three men who love her react?
Francine wants revenge, and selects as her instrument the best criminal lawyer in the country, a man named George Thomassy, who knows how to use the toughest methods to convince district attorneys, and perhaps the whole of civilized society, that a woman's body is hers. But is it hers alone?
Thomassy, a bachelor who at forty-four wants to preserve his privacy and freedom, knows that a lawyer's job is to rattle the skeletons in other people's closets. What is he to do when his own are rattled? Francine, who has sought the aid of a psychoanalyst, begins to learn what a psychoanalyst really thinks as he sits behind an attractive patient telling him in detail of her experiences with other men. And what is she to make of her father, a distinguished WASP lawyer, when he betrays his own feelings by showing her a certain photograph?
Other secrets of the dark side of love are revealed when we meet the rapist's wife, Mary Koslak. And then, as the story expands in ever-widening circles, we learn that Thomassy's Armenian immigrant father once had a love who was not Thomassy's mother, and when we find out what happened to that woman, we realize how connected all the events of the book are and why revenge is the universal human emotion most people prefer to hide.
As one brilliantly rendered character after another brings his or her case to center stage, we see how many and varied are the shapes of love, until we come to the one that proves irresistible.
This is the triumphant story about the true source of all of life's problems and exciting opportunities: other people. |
