Michael and Asher meet at the hotel. Michael, it transpires, is an unpublished poet. There is something about the young man’s attitude, which verges on the supercilious, that riles Asher. He is put off by Michael’s knowing references to Pasternak’s poetry and to Rimbaud. Their meeting ends on a sour note, with Asher irritated to the point of rudeness. The following morning, he is ashamed of his behavior: “Contrition set in: one of the milder infections I suffered from.” He contacts Michael, whom he calls “the boy,” and arranges another date. At this second encounter, Michael is accompanied by his girlfriend, a law student who bears the scarcely credible name Aurora d’Amore.

“But nobody has a name like that. Strippers, maybe. Are you a stripper?”

“No.”

“Aurora d’Amore. The dawn of love? Impossible. Unless your mother’s a classical scholar.”

“My mother’s a classical dago. Isn’t she, Michael?”

And so the stage is set for Michael and Aurora to perform their grisly double act, a danse macabre consisting of any number of cruelly inventive ways in which to humiliate and ultimately demean the Hollywood hack who once earned ludicrous sums of money. Between them, they put their hapless victim into the confessional, where he reveals his past follies, boasting of sexual conquests he has never boasted about before, and belittling the two women he has married. The darkly pretty Aurora is the more accomplished performer, using her unattainable body as a means of ensuring Asher’s downfall. Her acting skills are at their most adroit in chapter 29, in which she tells lie after lie after lie, every single one of which Asher believes to be true. He is so convinced of her honesty that when she concedes that she hasn’t been honest with him and is miserable as a consequence, he is driven to observe: “The things I do with a woman never vary. I see myself, down the years, in the gathering of time, squeezing unhappy hands. I hear my solicitous voice.”

The End of Me was published in 1968, during the age of flower power. Some critics have noted that Michael and Aurora are dropouts who renounce capitalism and enact their revenge on Asher because of their principles. They are, therefore, somewhat dated figures. I disagree with this judgment, seeing them, rather, as a pair of conniving tricksters who know a patsy when they see one coming. The human capacity to prey on the vulnerable is timeless and constant. The Internet has strengthened its destructive power. A new Michael and another beautiful Aurora are already making ingenious use of it.

Hayes said goodbye to fiction with The Stockbroker, the Bitter Young Man, and the Beautiful Girl, which appeared in 1973. It’s written in the third person and deals with the despair of its principal character, Arthur Lewis, in a manner that can justly be accounted hilarious. It’s as if Hayes is looking back on his career as a chronicler of love’s sorrows and discontents and asking himself why he took it all so seriously. It’s an eccentric masterpiece, with scenes of unforgettable farce. His prose is as clean-cut and precise as ever.