A novel about a young woman living in provincial America. The plot itself is nothing particularly remarkable. The problems the characters face are so familiar that the reader is bound to have an opinion of their own: what to do, how to react, how to act. And this is the slippery path on which the writer apparently sends his reader, expecting a “triumphant” return: exhausted, despairing of finding a way out, rolled in dust and dirt, having partly forgotten what he set out to find, and feeling only one joy, that he has managed to come back, and that it is just a book.
Along with a range of unpleasant emotions rooted in hopelessness, an incredible anger arises at the heroine, Lucy. Not because the reader never sees her climb out of the sticky swamp of “injustice” into which she has gradually sunk because of that very injustice, but because he himself has been sucked into it during his hopeless attempts to mentally talk the heroine out of “inflicting good” on those around her, hoping she would figure it out herself.
This is the story of a girl who believes she is good. But the heroine went further: she did not merely think so, she began to act. The novel is a tragedy.