Testimony and Demeanor

A young intellectual is called into active duty and receives a rude awakening to the realities of military service. An Ivy League graduate is pressed casually into Intelligence work and encounters himself mirrored in his new-found friend--a Russian spy. An arrogant professor finds himself unable to resist the unschooled energy of a spunky female student. A lonely apprentice at a New York law firm is flattered by the attentions of two mentors--one a senior partner, the other an enchantingly extravagant woman--whose sophistication make his own naivety painfully apparent. Each story in this luminous quartet explorers an emotional turning-point, either toward or away from self-knowledge--that moment when a young man of privilege suddenly finds his carefully nurtured superiority crumbling. In Casey’s beautiful prose, the experiences of these solitary narrators resonate with remarkable power.

John Casey was born in 1939 in Worcester, Massachusetts, and educated at Harvard College, Harvard Law School, and the University of Iowa. His novel Spartina won the National Book Award in 1989. He lives with his wife in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he is Professor of English Literature at the University of Virginia.