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Clive longs for company and cohesion in his dessicated post-painting, post-married life. But he discovers almost immediately that he has wildly underestimated the power of the home place and the Proustian sense of "how memories reside in the landscape and arise when you revisit an area." Mooning over Laurette, his first girlfriend — long divorced herself, and living nearby in her old family farmhouse with a flirtatious female companion — Clive takes up painting again in order to re-create the grandest erotic encounter of his early manhood.

There's a lot more virtual eros in the companion novella, the title piece Harrison calls "The River Swimmer." The main character, a Midwestern boy named Thad, is in years not yet a man, but in experience triumphantly erotic. He swims great lakes and rivers, has visions of water babies swimming around him beneath the surface, and becomes involved with beautiful, attractive and willing girls his own age — with, as it happens, overbearing and successful fathers who sometimes try to kill him, and sometimes nearly succeed. In his outsized — almost cartoonlike — philosophical ambition, Thad declares "I just want to feel at home on earth ..." He already feels quite at home in water, which makes up a large part of our planet's surface, so when he strives to achieve his goal of feeling at home — not unlike that longing of Clive, his much more mature companion in this volume — he seems to have a good chance. No fathers wielding tire irons or tempting him with a life of luxury seem capable of deterring him much from his goal.

A boy with hopes as vast as oceans, a mature man entering into the solemnity of wholeness in a narrow range of life: together they make up what Tom Wolfe once announced — and failed to produce — as "a man in full."

What does the male version of quality of life really mean? Something like this, something like this. And female readers who don't give over some time to studying Harrison's version of it will be as foolish as the men.