His serial adultery ends when he begins a liaison with a female assistant at his advertising firm, Gwen Hunt, whose independent mind fascinates him; he becomes obsessed with her, perhaps even feeling true love towards her.

He fails to lock a drawer with their nude photographs, perhaps subsconsciously wanting to be found out; a prying maid discovers them and shows them to Florence (and before that, it turns out, to their adopted daughter, now a university student).

Florence persuades him to leave Gwen and to re-invigorate their life with a self-improvement regimen; both seem perfectly content though somewhat dull but after several months he crashes his car in an apparent suicide attempt.

After several false starts, in which the newly "authentic" Eddie is arrested for indecent exposure, burns down his parents' house, a symbol of his father's tyranny over the family, is later shot by Gwen's jealous suitor, and is subsequently committed to a mental hospital, Eddie settles down with Gwen in Connecticut as a liquor dealer and starts to write short stories.

as being partially autobiographical; the narrator, like Kazan, is a Greek-American and a political liberal who had briefly been a member of the Communist Party USA in the 1930s before becoming disillusioned with it.