The Soul of Henry Jones

Henry Jones has everything a man could want, a home, a wife, a steady life, and yet he wakes each morning with a hollowness he cannot name. His days blur into one another until he meets Elsie Morton, a young woman whose vitality cracks open the careful architecture of his contentment. Through her, Henry remembers what it feels like to be alive: to paddle a canoe at dusk, to want something beyond the familiar. But Elsie forces an impossible question upon him: can a man be whole when he lives only half of himself? Ray Cummings writes with quiet precision about the particular devastation of realizing you've been sleepwalking through your own life. This is a novella about the risk of awakening, and the harder risk of choosing not to. It understands that some men go to their graves never having truly been awake, and it renders that tragedy without melodrama, in prose as clear and restrained as early morning light.