The visions of Nicholas Solon
by Monroe Engel
Description
Nicholas Solon, an Ivy League professor who seems to want no more of the world than a quiet life, the good opinion of his fellows, and the love of his beautiful wife, is a man with a strong sense of justice and an unwillingness to deal with life at second hand. When the past returns to demand its fees from him he considers it his duty pay out those fees in person, without looking to the total. Thus, when the woman who has been his father's common-law wife comes back into Nick's world at his father's death, Nick promptly offers to sign over to her the income that is legally his. And when she burdens him further with her presence and her problems, he thinks it only right that she should continue to have some part in his life. As a handsome and unattached young instructor, Nick had permitted himself to have affairs with some of the faculty wives, seeking no permanent bond and anticipating no serious consequences.^
He falls into an almost passionless relationship with a woman who has only one aim--to have Nick father a child for her. When she has accomplished her purpose, the bleak affair ends. Nick's not ill-meant deeds sow consequences that have an explosive effect on his life and the lives of several of his closest associates, prompting the eventual suicide of one forlorn friend and the complete collapse of Nick's marriage. Despite a seemingly quiet exterior, this story is fast-moving and tightly plotted. The characters are all alive and breathing--from the nymphomaniac who has a dread of being taken for granted, to the terrified woman who hides herself and her little girl in a barren New York apartment in fear for their lives.^
Many of the major scenes in this novel will linger long in the reader's mind--the midnight burning of the hovel that houses a gaunt drunkard, his overblown wife, and their unkempt brood; the summer boarding house where Nick, as a boy, meets the first woman he ever loves; the joyous day and night that Nick and his new girl spend on her little sailboat; the bitter intra-faculty conniving that provides cowardly men with a chance for polite revenge; the ghastly highway death of the pathetic alcoholic who was doomed to love the wife who had abandoned him; the tender passages between the child and the father who could not acknowledge his fatherhood; the gentle resignation of an old man to the rapid approach of death.
He falls into an almost passionless relationship with a woman who has only one aim--to have Nick father a child for her. When she has accomplished her purpose, the bleak affair ends. Nick's not ill-meant deeds sow consequences that have an explosive effect on his life and the lives of several of his closest associates, prompting the eventual suicide of one forlorn friend and the complete collapse of Nick's marriage. Despite a seemingly quiet exterior, this story is fast-moving and tightly plotted. The characters are all alive and breathing--from the nymphomaniac who has a dread of being taken for granted, to the terrified woman who hides herself and her little girl in a barren New York apartment in fear for their lives.^
Many of the major scenes in this novel will linger long in the reader's mind--the midnight burning of the hovel that houses a gaunt drunkard, his overblown wife, and their unkempt brood; the summer boarding house where Nick, as a boy, meets the first woman he ever loves; the joyous day and night that Nick and his new girl spend on her little sailboat; the bitter intra-faculty conniving that provides cowardly men with a chance for polite revenge; the ghastly highway death of the pathetic alcoholic who was doomed to love the wife who had abandoned him; the tender passages between the child and the father who could not acknowledge his fatherhood; the gentle resignation of an old man to the rapid approach of death.
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