Humboldt's Gift

For many years, Von Humboldt Fleisher and Charles Citrine were the best of friends-Humboldt a grand erratic figure; Charlie a young man of frenzied and noble longings. But by the 1970s, Humboldt has died a failure in New York and Charlie's success-ridden life in Chicago has taken various turns for the worse. Then Humboldt acts from the grave to change Charlie's life-he leaves Charlie a bequest in his will.

Now, Charlie is middle-aged and a bit shaky and it is high time that his life came to something. His days are cluttered with comic absurdities and his destiny seems obscured. Himself a thinker, he longs to come from left field and knock them all dead, to make intellectuals as clearly superfluous as they seem to him to be. But his ex-wife has him enmeshed in law suits; he is held in thrall by the young, sexually-beguiling but expensive and unsuitable Renata; he has fallen into the hands of a neurotic Mafioso named Rinaldo Cantabile; and his career seems to have ground to a halt.