Timmy Colt is a young lawyer with a law firm in New York City in the early 1950s. He has a wife, Ann, and two young sons. He works mainly with one of the partners of the law firm, Henry Knox. He is very good at what he does and so it is not surprising that another of the partners, Sheridan Dale, wants to use Colt on a legal matter with a client, George Emlen, who is a relative of Dale's.
Colt doesn't want to do it because he doesn't like Dale. But Knox talks him into it. So Colt goes to work for Dale and Emlen and discovers that he dislikes Emlen even more than he dislikes Dale. Emlen doesn't like Colt either and so he double checks Colt's work and finds a mistake. At this point, Colt's dislike has changed to hatred and he finds Emlen intolerable. So after the legal case ends successfully, at the party given to celebrate the conclusion, Colt loses it and says some very unkind things to Emlen.
This does not make either Dale or Knox happy. And they make it clear that Colt's career is in danger if he doesn't apologize to Emlen. But Colt remains stubbornly against doing so. Until his wife, Ann, talks him into it, for her and their children's sakes. So Colt eats crow and makes his apology to Emlen. But it rankles and he takes it out on his boss, Knox. The harsh words he said were the last words he ever exchanged with Knox, who died shortly afterward of a heart attack.
So now that Knox is gone, Colt is stuck working for Dale. Colt knuckles down and does what Dale wants. His anger at being forced to apologize to Emlen still lingers and he takes it out on Ann, becoming cold and distant. He moves out and into an apartment alone.
Of course, it doesn't take long until Colt has a new woman in his life, a society belle who is the opposite of his boring, ordinary wife. Eileen introduces him to the upper crust and to the finer things in life. He and Eileen seem really taken with each other. But then his nemesis, Emlen, is back again. This time Colt is charged with closing a trust and splitting it three equal ways between Emlen and his two sisters. But Colt figures out that Emlen is trying to pull a fast one. And a further complication is that Emlen is related to Eileen. Colt makes the mistake of telling Eileen about his suspicions of Emlen and she tells one of the sisters. And the whole thing blows up into a big deal that may mean Colt could lose not only his job but his law license and maybe worse.
The novel starts out pretty slow but builds up quite a bit with the Emlen story. Colt comes across as a man who has ethics and principles who is probably in the wrong profession. His determination to be above board in his professional life is at odds with the requirements of being a lawyer, a profession that is not known for their ethics or honesty. Meanwhile he takes his discontent out on his wife and damages their marriage.
The novel was written in the early 1950s. The author has this to say about two upper class women Colt encounters working for Dale as compared to his wife, Ann:
Even when he [Colt] felt uneasily that she [Ann] might be right about his perfectionism, he still had his reservations about her own lack of curiosity. For was she not rather glorying in middle-class limitations? Was it so wrong to be amused? He was frankly fascinated by Mrs. Emlen and her younger, thinner, blonder sister, Mrs. Dale. He thought of them together because they were constantly together, the kind of women who found intimacy only in the easy sympathy, the unresented criticisms, the common presumptions of a sibling relationship. Their joint laps were complacently, indifferently available to the gifts of this world. That the witty should demonstrate their wit to them, the beautiful their beauty, the artist his most finished piece of work, they assumed with the unselfconscious complacency of Goya infantas. Yet this was not from any observed conceit. That anyone should have expected them to be amusing or beautiful or even artistic would have struck them as quite absurd. Nor did it seem to spring from any sense of class or money; Timmy [Colt] could never make out that they saw any difference between the fortune that had been partly inherited by the late Mr. Emlen and the money earned by the self-made Dale. Such things were expected of men. It even occurred to him that they felt entitled to the world for the simple reason that they were women. If it was so, the Ann was just the opposite. She seemed to feel entitled to reject it for the same reason.
The copy I have is dated 1965 and is described on the back of the book as an "adult novel." Which is probably why I picked it up to read. Though after reading it, it is kind of puzzling why it was considered an "adult" novel. My guess it is because one of the characters is a homosexual man who fancies Colt. Other is the only sex scene in the novel where Colt and Eileen get together:
In a moment he was beside her on the sofa, his arms around her, his lips hard on hers. And she who had been so still, so seemingly passive, came suddenly to life; her fingers were in his hair, her body pressed against his. There was an urgency to her that took him by surprise; it was as if to hide her from herself that he reached finally behind her to switch off the light. And he discovered in the hour that followed, bewildered in the very violence of his gratification, that Eileen's need for beauty was not confined to what she saw and heard. She was an artist in the act of giving herself.
Here is a review from Kirkus Reviews.
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