Annie’s voyage of discovery takes her from New York to California to New York and then to Europe. On her way, she twice experiences something like an unfettered innocence of experience. Each takes place in the American West. Each is a retreat, from society and from cruel consciousness, to the pastoral. Once, in Yosemite, she is with Walter Vogel, the returned husband whom she will divorce. The second time, she is with Myron Eagle, a physician who saved her life and now is her lover. With Eagle, it is the “last real time she spent in California,” it is “timeless, mindless pleasure” in an absolutely rustic setting. Such moments of the pastoral are, traditionally, the place away from civilized complications where nature—including human sexuality—may hold sway. But the lovers, taking a walk, come upon “the remains of an old movie set,” looking “like a small frontier village.” And soon thereafter, Eagle tells Annie that “‘You can’t ask people not to have a viewpoint—to simply look, the way you do. One of these days, you’ll have to come to some conclusions…like the rest of us.’” For a disengaged innocence is no entitlement, Ms. Fox seems to be alerting her protagonist: even an Edenic landscape may be as artificial as a movie set; we pollute what we inhabit, we are cursed with consciousness, and absolute innocence is not, finally, available to the thinking human animal. We have an obligation to evaluate. We are condemned to do so.

Annie’s journey must be into that contention, and it must involve a confrontation with her own disgust. She seems to consider herself, by the end of this disquieting, brilliantly observed novel, more free than fettered. She says, so perfectly, “‘I was taken to California…After a while, I escaped.’”

PART ONE
The Convention

Chapter 1

Even on the most bitter afternoons of the winter of 1939, a man wearing neither coat nor hat marched up the rise to the Claremont Inn, paused there for the instant it took him to draw himself upright and salute the old building, then strode on toward Grant’s Tomb. Often, the wind blew hard across the Hudson River and lifted the loose grains of snow from a graying crust that shrank and hardened day by day as though it ate the ground it lay upon. In the winter clarity of the air the man, his loose shirt billowing about his waist and meager breastbone, seemed to send forth a livid light of his own.