The Malefactors: A Novel

The Malefactors by Caroline Gordon is "undoubtedly the most serious and successful fictional treatment of a conversion by an American writer to date," according to Flannery O'Connor. It perfectly captures the Lost Generation's enervated carnality and marmoreal frigidity, as well as the ensuing need and desire for meaning.

Tom and Vera Claiborne have settled at Blencker’s Bridge with a motley assortment of friends, family, and literati. Despite life at Blencker’s Bridge being “a party every day,” a deepening sense of disaffection develops among its inhabitants: Tom, frustrated by his poetic impotency, takes a mistress; his cousin and his wife offer psychiatric theories and treatments; and Vera throws herself into farming and animal husbandry—all seeking to find what once was lost.