Call: The Tale of Two Passions

A masterpiece of ironic narration and sexual tragedy, told by an American who realizes only too late that he has been the fool in his own marriage. John Dowell tells the story of his wife Florence, his friend Edward Ashburnham, and Edward's wife Leonora with a melancholy detachment that gradually reveals the wreckage beneath Edward's heroic surface. The great English gentleman, beloved by all, carried on affairs with both women in his orbit, and Dowell's dawning comprehension of what actually happened over nine years of intimate acquaintance makes for devastating reading. Ford's prose is deceptively simple, with every carefully placed detail paying off dozens of pages later. This is the novel Henry James might have written if he'd allowed himself to weep. It is also, quietly, one of the most honest explorations of desire and social performance in English literature: a book about how we lie to ourselves, how we mistake passion for love, and how convention can make monsters of perfectly ordinary people.