John and Ethel Grandin’s marriage has drifted far from its original happy start, and they now spend “scarcely a dozen evenings together a month.” He is obsessed with his books and writing, she has become increasingly bitter with his inattention and remembers fondly how their early lovemaking allowed her “for the first time in her life [to] come into her own: alive, aware, confident.” But with time and two children, “the pleasures of love soon turned into the solider pleasures of marriage.” On a vacation to Nantucket to reinvigorate their marriage, the Grandins meet Cliff Hauman and his new wife Billie, who are on their honeymoon. Cliff, a Marine captain, is “a giant, six-feet-two or -three, and heavily built: enormous shoulders, large head, blond curling hair, blue eyes—the athlete, the American idol, uninteresting.” For John it is obsession at first sight, and he begins to idealize Cliff—who looms in his mind as iconic, heroic masculinity—through his readings of Walt Whitman and A.E. Housman and emotionally compares him to Achilles, Hector, Jason, and Siegfried.

Jackson is meticulous here in charting not only John’s growing enthrallment with Cliff, but also Ethel’s emotional confusion, and—most importantly—the clearly heterosexual Cliff’s ambivalence as he flirts with John, telling him stories of threesomes with a woman and another marine, his “natural assumption that men should be with men, and women with women,” and, over John’s strenuous objections, putting suntan lotion on the professor’s back while at the beach.

Jackson’s genius is that he manages to navigate, and situate, the erotic complexity of this triangle all in the dead center of the war’s crisis of masculinity and death. Characters keep looking at photos and stories of dead armed services men in Life magazine, Cliff talks about the war, John worries about being 4-F and unable to fight, even the mythic heroes John associates with Cliff are all warriors. What Jackson understands so well is that the Grandins’ and Cliff’s world—and maybe America—is living in a dream of war and death.

It is an unsettling vision of love, sex and America, particularly since it was written at the end of World War II when these wounds, memories, and emotions had barely begun healing. But the American reading public seemed ready for the book. Thomas Mann wrote a glowing endorsement of it—“It is a courageous, ruthlessly probing book, uncovering without a trace of speculative frivolity the difficulties, embarrassments, and fears of marital and sexual life”—reviews were generally positive, and, according to Blake Bailey’s biography of Jackson, Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson (2013), it sold 75,000 copies in cloth and 291,000 in paper. Several film deals were discussed but—because of its homosexual content—nothing became of them.