SPRINGER'S PROGRESS

Here comes Lucien Springer. Age: forty-seven. Still handsome though muchly vodka
'd novelist, currently abashed by acute creative dysfunction. Sole preoccupation
amid these artistic doldrums: pursuit of fair women. Springer is a randy incorr
igible who is guided by only one inflexible precept: no protracted affairs. And
thus he has slyly sustained eighteen years of marriage.

Enter, then, Jessica Co
rnford. Age: almost half of Lucien's. Lush of body and roguish of mind. Whereupo
n what begins as bawdy interlude becomes perhaps the most untidy extramarital le
ch in literature.