"COPYRIGHT"

Tom Blair is a recently divorced, well-known New York-based writer who has gone to his country home in Grant Falls, in the Adirondack mountains to find inspiration for his next book.  While there he begins to speculate on the nature of reality and wonders why none of his characters have ever complained about the roles he has set for them, particularly those who have been placed in tragedies.  He feels particularly guilty about a young woman, Jenny, the main character of one of his novels, "Aftermath" and decides to make amends by literary means.

During his stay in the town of Grant Falls he meets and begins a relationship with a journalist who has come to interview him, Jessica who quickly realizes that Tom is undergoing some sort of mental crisis, not yet realizing that he is verging on schizophenia.  They return to New York City together and continue their relationship but Tom in increasingly unstable.

One day he sees his character Jenny in the street and approaches her, but she ignores him.  From this point on Tom increasingly loses the ability to distinguish between ordinary reality and that of his own making.  He eventually confesses to Jenny, with whom he is now living, the truth, and at the same time begins a new novel to save Jenny from the sordid end to which he consigned her in "Aftermath", by placing  an alter ego of himself in the new book to act as a Pygmalion, but he increasingly becomes obsessed with Jenny and jealous of his fictional, Tom Blair.

While all of this is occurring, Jessica fights for Tom, as best she can, and so the story develops into a strange *menage-a-*trois.