Book Description

The story begins in the emergency room in Corinth Hospital in 1967 where a slightly wounded professor is brought in by a friend. The local reporter tries to flesh out the story, but his editor kills it, and all that is clear is that there was some sort of duel. It introduces the three main mail characters, John Dobrov, Turner Ashby DeLay, and Charley Steinke. Then there is a flashback to 1952, and the novel follows the stories of the three who are brought together on the Georgia campus in 1961. The second chapter is set on the campus of Golden State University in California where the main character in the story, Evangeline Higginson, has founded the Rosy-Fingered Dawn Club, a small group of Coeds who anticipate an enlargement of the career opportunities for women. Hig is a beautiful woman, but, unlike most female leades, she has a flinty character, and her superior intelligence carefully analyzes all the situations she encounters. She is also an electra, and thus does not view the male sex with hostility. She rescues and completely remakes a crippled football player as a kind of hobby to alleviate her boredom. This leads to an unexpected marriage, and she has to put her own career on hold until her husband is settled in his profession. How does a liberated woman maintain her identity in wedlock? This is a continuing question during the 1960's. Her massive intelligence also grapples with an age-old question -- what is this thing called love? She believes that men marry for sex, women for companionship, and wonders if love is a myth devised by women to gild economic motives. Not until the final chapter does she find answers to these two questions that satisfy her. The football player she rescues, remakes, and marries is John Dobrov, a man's man of Czech background from Youngstown, Ohio. He regards his wife with awe, and is uttterly dominated by her in all areas until he meets a colleague, Turner Ashby DeLay, who is equal to his wife in intelligence, but has an entirely different reaction to contemporary developments, the integration crises, the women's movement, and the Vietnam War. Dobrov is a man with all the attitudes programmed into the male sex, and his marriage becomes a crescendo of clashes with his wife. A basic problem between them is one that is always overlooked in both novels and real life. Turner Ashby DeLay is a Southern aristocrat with deep emotional attachments to traditional America, and especially the South. As a prisoner of war, he meets up with some Chinese ideologues, and he is impressed by their intelligence and firmness of purpose. Thus, he finds Communist influence behind all of the reform movements in contemporary America. His wife, Sarabel, is the complete Southern lady with fixed ideas and attitudes. None of the contemporary issues mean much to her save as they affect her own family life. Her family to her is everything. Her husband comes back from the war a changed man, her daughter becomes part of the rock scene, her son adopts her father's traditional views, and she is left in isolation. But she is also a beautiful woman -- Charlie Steinke wakes her up to that fact.