Almost Perfect

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by Alice Adams

Simon and Schuster

Due/Published June 1998, 256 pages, paper

ISBN 0671020692

The most ambitious and fully realized novel we have yet had from the author of Caroline's Daughters and Superior Women is set in San Francisco in the 1980s. At the center: an almost perfect couple spiraling to a crash, as the talented and charming Richard Fallon moves slowly, inexplicably into madness. He is in his early 40s when he meets Stella Blake. He is known by everyone -- loved, hated, adored, admired. Stella -- loving, effortlessly talented, almost beautiful, and soon to be a famous writer -- enters his life when she interviews him for a magazine article. And they fall easily in love. They are perceived as a golden couple. Everything works for them. Their lives shimmer. But little by little, Richard's erratic demeanor, his eerie use of his creativity, and his manic sexuality start to take hold. As Stella watches the man she adores begin a steady and frightening descent into darkness, Alice Adams brilliantly and movingly explores what happens to love when the essence of the beloved becomes transformed, unrecognizable, lost.