Harry Citron - Bostonian, Harvard man, and Distinguished Professor of Literature - has lived for twenty years in the shadow of a brief but passionate affair with a French woman. As the novel opens Harry has decided to leave academia, both to search for his lost love in France and to try to find the meaning in his life that academia never provided. He sets off for Paris, not to continue his critical studies of Camus and Sartre but to be them, searching all the while for the elusive Suzanne.

But what Harry finds in Paris surprises him and the reader: his long-remembered lover is dramatically...