Before Thornton Wilder broke the world's heart with The Bridge of San Luis Rey, he wrote this: a sharp, glittering novel about a young American adrift in the ancient corridors of post-war Rome, stumbling into the orbit of an enigmatic secret society known only as the Cabala. The group consists of fading European nobility, a powerful cardinal of the Roman Church, and wealthy American expatriates, all of them trapped in a mesmerizing orbit of power, boredom, and quiet desperation. James Blair arrives in Rome as a student but quickly learns that the real education has nothing to do with textbooks. The Cabala seduces him with exclusivity, threatens him with exclusion, and forces him to reckon with questions that would haunt all of Wilder's later work: What does it mean to live meaningfully in a world hurtling toward meaninglessness?
