A Long Day's Dying is a mid-twentieth-century Jamesian novel that foreshadows many of the themes in Mr. Buechner's later writing—faith, trust, and the complex relations of family and friends. The story follows Tristram Bone, a rotund man of wealth and "organized leisure" but a failure with women, and Elizabeth Poor, a rich, charming, and beautiful widow and Bone's unrequited love interest, through a series of encounters with friends and family, affairs real and imagined, gossip, jealousy, and innuendo. We also meet Bone's servant Emma and his pet monkey Simon; the novelist George Motley; the arrogant and seductive academic Paul Steitler, Elizabeth's naïve son Lee, and her omniscient mother Maroo.

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