‘The middlebrow is the man, or woman, of middlebred intelligence who ambles and saunters now on this side of the hedge, now on that, in pursuit of no single object, neither art itself nor life itself, but both mixed indistinguishably, and rather nastily, with money, fame, power, or prestige,’ lectures Virginia Woolf. Why having her here? Is it middlebrow to demand that literature ought to deal with moral concerns, as John Gardner has? His hero philosopher, Mickelsson, out for fame and prestige and perennially short of money, certainly regards himself as highbrow, conversing in his troubled mind with the likes of Luther, Nietzsche, Collingwood and Wittgenstein. He is attracted both to brainy colleague Jessica Stark, or ‘Jessie’ (if anything slightly more highbrow, and certainly morally superior) and to distinctly lowbrow pouting underage amateur prostitute Donnie Matthews who, since Mickelsson forgets himself and she forgets the pill, will conceive and then abort. And then there is ‘at the sink a tall auburn-haired girl in a black dress and white apron, (…) too classy to be a student.’ Mickelsson can’t place her, which makes her doubly interesting. (It turns out she is in mourning, and therefore off-limits.) Jessica may well be in deep mourning, too, having lost not only her husband Buzzy to cancer, but, years ago, two kids in a boating accident. At the final party at Jessie’s house, her dead husband Buzzy (‘his face decayed, horrible’) will make a return as a ghost and fix Mickelsson a lemon twist: ‘I was afraid you’d decided you shouldn’t come in.’ The implication being that Buzzy is set to condone the last scene of the book where, while the party of the living and the dead runs its course, ‘crazy bastard’ Mickelsson and Jessie withdraw to the bedroom, the crazy bastard plans the future (‘My mother may have to live with us’) and does come in (‘“Ah,” Mickelsson cried, shoving himself in. — “Sweet Christ,” she whispered, eyes snapping shut’), both being sucked up in a ghost-addled crescendo ‘as if the world had gone unspeakably weird.’