The Second Book

A quarter of a century ago, Andrew Barclay wrote a best-selling novel. He has never produced another book. Now a young PhD student from Los Angeles has tracked down the recluse to a backward town in a third-world Central American country. Looking for material for her thesis, she visits the writer; but instead of the brilliant author of memorable prose she finds an aging alcoholic whose twenty-five-year effort to produce another novel has generated nothing he deems worthy of publication. But...