Tracks That Lead to Joy

Sometimes the lives we lead don't fit our natures.

Ross Rowen, heir to a pharmaceutical fortune, deserts the velvet life of wealth and haute culture to live in poverty among blue-collar laborers. Shannon Flavin deserts a troubled family to take her place in the great Manhattan. They meet in the diner where Shannon waitresses and instantly fall in love. When Ross accosts a Vietnam War protestor, they travel to Shannon's home in Blue Water, New Jersey. Life in the backwater resort clashes with Ross's quixotic temperament. They return to Manhattan, but life in a Midtown mansion doesn’t match Shannon’s guileless disposition. She doesn’t belong in the gilded society Ross saunters through. She doesn’t belong among Ross’s intellectual friends. She returns alone to Blue Water.

The broken tracks on the beach at Blue Water lead to reconciliation and the novel’s fundamental insight: it is not possible to cure a life. Misfits in the greater life of the world, they fit into one another’s life, perfectly. Shannon rescued Ross from a debauched life in New York. Ross follows her to Blue Water and learns what love requires. In the novel’s tumultuous close, Ross risks death to save the love of his life.