A Long Day’s Dying revolves around the lives of seven characters—at their center, Tristram Bone: a wealthy, middle-aged, and enormously corpulent bachelor in possession of a pet monkey and attended by his elderly German housekeeper, Emma.

A middle-aged widow, Elizabeth's carefree nature renders her prone to moments of extreme apathy and ennui, tendencies that leave Bone unsure of her perception of him.

In an attempt to deepen his friendship with Elizabeth, Motley proposes that she travel with him the following day to an unnamed university—likely Buechner's alma mater, Princeton—where he is due to deliver a lecture.

When Elizabeth spends the night with Steitler, Motley sees an opportunity to strengthen his relationship with Bone, following his faux pas at the Cloisters, and so he rushes to relay the details of the love affair back to him.

Left with a beautifully laid table, an already prepared meal, and no companion to enjoy it with, Bone asks his housekeeper, Emma, to sit and eat with him and his pet monkey, Simon.

It is an intricate and elegantly written tale in which, in the words of critic Dale Brown, there are ‘no moral dictates, no decisive understanding between people, only a blind, dimly motivated action, producing consequences that follow like the falling of randomly arranged dominoes’.

To these themes, Brown adds ‘such emphatically modern preoccupations as’:[T]he carelessness of the upper class, the problem of trying to get beyond the limitations of one’s own consciousness, the inevitable doom that hangs over our every attempt at connection with others, and the devastation wrought by the manipulations of one character in the life of another.

The acclaimed English novelist, Malcolm Lowry, declared that A Long Day’s Dying  was ‘executed with almost flawless taste, and technically, a high degree of excellence’.

[12]Carl Van Vechten, widely recognised as a patron of the Harlem Renaissance and also for his work as the literary executor of Gertrude Stein, stated himself ‘a great admirer of Frederick Buechner's A Long Day's Dying’, while also noting its impressiveness as a debut: ‘It is the book of a first novelist already arrived, most original, and filled with wit, nostalgia, and emotion.’[13] The renowned composer, conductor, and author, Leonard Bernstein, also eulogised the novel, remarking:I have rarely been so moved by a perception.

[14]Newsweek heralded Buechner's debut work as ‘one of the best and most unusual of recent novels’,[15] while the Saturday Review of Literature found it to be ‘written with remarkable virtuosity’.