Senator and one-time presidential hopeful Harry Victor, and her enduring romance with Jack Lovett, a CIA agent/war profiteer whom Inez first met as a teenager living in Hawaii.

A review by Mary McCarthy in The New York Times noted the influence of the writings of Joseph Conrad on the novel and compared the ending to that of "The Cocktail Party" by T. S.

[1] The novel focuses on a satire of liberal politics that is exemplified by Harry, who names his son Adlai, gets tear-gassed at the 1968 Democratic National Convention so it can be photographed by Life magazine and uses phrases such as "I happen to believe".

[5] Kirkus Reviews commented that the novel had some witty lines of dialogue and Didion's characteristic details but that it was "a chic literary objet with a thin soap-opera center".

[1] Thomas Edwards described it in The New York Review of Books as "absorbing, immensely intelligent, and witty, and it finally earns its complexity of form".