this, and she is mentally unstable. Phil spies, through a liftable curtain, on Rachel and Evan having sex, but gets caught. Ashamed, he heads off at speed to his replacement boarding school for the new term, glad to see the back of "this rotten town". He meets Curtis, his father, on the way, who buys him two new suits to take back to school with him to wear. Evan goes downstairs to tell his mother-in-law, Gloria, that he and Rachel are ending the house-sharing arrangement. But when Evan comes back upstairs he has an argument with Rachel, he hits her in the face, and leaves. He goes to a bar alone to console himself. Drinking and mulling over his options, Evan decides he would prefer to be back with his ex-wife Mary, and their daughter Kathleen, in preference to being with current wife Rachel and the new son. The book ends with Rachel changing the baby's nappy, waiting alone for Evan to come home to her. External links http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/y/richard_yates/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20070509221812/http://bostonreview.net/BR24.5/onan.html Novels by Richard Yates 1986 American novels Novels set in Long Island