Roger is an outsized, rumpled, sand-colored man, rooted in The Pleiade, his secondhand bookshop on Columbus Avenue. He has a singular passion for modernist classics, but his friends note he doesn’t quite _read _these books – rather, he familiarizes himself with placenames, chapters, beginnings and endings. Roger attended Columbia in his undergraduate years, and an eclectic cast of college friends still stop by The Pleiade to visit. Female assistants, first Jenny, then Maureen, then Lois, flow in and out of his life with little consequence. He does not entertain. He has an incredible eye for modest and mediocre authors when they appear in the shop. He clangs away at his fourteenth boilerplate novel on a typewriter in the back of the shop, unaffected by every publisher’s rejection. The only defeat Roger seems to suffer, in any aspect of his life, is his inability to write in the autobiographical mode. When the presence of both Lois and Maureen in the shop oppresses him, he shoos one of them out. Before Christmas, Lois leaves for her hometown. In January, Maureen fades away, and the cantankerous Jenny makes a return. Roger’s lawyer friend of poetic passions passes away, and his mourning fades into the innocence of springtime. Inflation goes up, surrounding stores remodel, Roger and his shop trundle ahead.