Gabe Wallach is a graduate student in literature at the University of Iowa and an ardent admirer of Henry James.

Fearing that the intellectual demands of a life in literature might leave him cloistered, Gabe seeks solace in what he thinks of as "the world of feeling".

"Debts and Sorrows" Having served in the Korean War after college, Gabe Wallach is finishing his military service in Oklahoma when he receives a letter his mother wrote to him from her death bed.

During phone conversations Gabe's father nearly begs him to return home and questions his son about why he would go so far from New York to graduate school.

Gabe also has a relationship with Marge Howells, an undergraduate from a well-to-do WASP family who is openly rebelling from her parents.

The blunt language of Asher is the first, and perhaps the most dominant, example in this novel of the frank sexual dialogue and discussion that Roth would later become renowned and notorious for.

Faced with many conflicting opinions, none of which he really wants to listen to, Paul decides to go ahead and elope with Libby on Christmas Eve.

Paul Herz and his wife Libby become estranged from their families because one is Jewish and the other is Christian (religion reemerges as an issue towards the end of the novel).

Social class also plays a role, especially between Gabe and his girlfriend for much of the novel, Martha, who is a divorced mother of two struggling to make ends meet.

Gabe, at one point, tells a fellow University of Chicago faculty member that he should marry her, but he ultimately flees back to Martha.

Throughout the novel, the characters are confronted with the sometimes-thin line separating sexual promiscuity from sanctity in the eyes of the predominant culture.

Abortion, divorce, remarriage and adoption affect the lives and psyches of Roth's subjects as the plot unfolds.