The Lay Anthony: A Romance

Anthony Ball rules Bay Street with the easy confidence of a young man everyone thinks they know. He's baseball-star handsome, effortlessly popular, the kind of figure who moves through crowds while women pause their haggling to smile and groups of youths part to let him pass. But beneath this polished exterior churns something far more turbulent: a dull, unreasoning anger against the universe, a desperate hunger for something authentic in a world he sees as fundamentally superficial. He owes money he can't repay, faces the humiliation of asking his rigorously just father, and carries an innocence he publicly mocks while privately cherishing. When Eliza Dreen enters his life with her refreshing perspective, Anthony finds himself caught between the persona he's built and the self he suspects he's betraying. Hergesheimer's 1914 novel is a quietly devastating portrait of youthful longing, of the painful gap between who we pretend to be and who we actually are. It appeals to readers who savor the quiet agonies of early modernism, where the most profound battles happen inside a character rather than in the world.