Every failure that poet Michael Davenport suffers in his efforts to become established as a professional writer weighs against the uneasy knowledge that his wife, Lucy, has an untapped private fortune amounting to millions of dollars. Young, newly married and intensely ambitious, Michael Davenport is trying to make a living as a writer. His adoring wife, Lucy, has a private fortune that he won't touch in case it compromises his art. She in turn is never quite certain of what is expected of her. All she knows is that everyone else seems, somehow, happier.In this magnificent novel, at once bitterly sad and achingly funny, Richard Yates again shows himself to be the supreme chronicler of the American Dream and its casualties.