His friends Arthur and Nancy Croom do all they can to help him recover, but they do not want to hear talk of death, a “politically reactionary” subject. They do want to hear about their mutual friend Gifford Maxim, who has defected from the Communist party. The Crooms embody the follies, hypocrisies, and failures of imagination that Trilling imputes to liberalism in his discursive essays. They cannot believe that Maxim’s life is in danger; they will not believe that the Communist party is controlled by the Soviet Union; they are full of the liberal condescension (a favourite Trilling target) that imputes all bad behaviour by the poor and members of minority groups to inescapable environment and circumstances. Nancy, a repository of jejune cliches, speaks of the Stalin regime as “a great social experiment” that cannot be judged by old-fashioned moral standards.

The most richly conceived character is Maxim, modelled on Trilling’s old college acquaintance Whittaker Chambers (as Trilling knew him before the Alger Hiss spy case, which commenced in 1948). Maxim challenges all that the Crooms believe in, by his polemical sharpness as much as by his defection. He enters the novel to unmask the inflated rhetoric of the party. No, he tells them, the party has nothing to do with equal rights or trade unionism, only with cruelty, oppression and mass murder. Like Camus, Maxim has come to believe that the deepest desire of every progressive intellectual is to rule by force, to follow in the footsteps of the Grand Inquisitor.

Laskell too had been a liberal fellow-traveller, refusing to acknowledge the ruthlessness of the Communist party and the danger to Maxim’s life. But he is swayed not so much by Maxim’s arguments as by the obtuseness of Nancy Croom’s resistance to them. True, he is repelled by Maxim’s newly adopted religious and authoritarian views, but more appalled by the Crooms’ imbecilic reaction to them. They bristle at the suggestion of religion (“mysticism”) as the alternative to Communism. The moral shallowness and intellectual dimness of the Crooms shock Laskell more than Maxim’s conversion.