When David’s marriage to Alice falters, the presence of Julia, younger and full of life, only sharpens the cracks. But as Alice is struck by a terminal illness, the fragile balance between love, anger, loyalty, and guilt collapses.
Friday at Four is a stark and moving story about marriage, infidelity, and the courage to face death. With unadorned honesty and rare emotional depth, this moving novel explores the ties that bind us — and how easily they unravel.
With precise, almost clinical observation and passages of lyrical beauty, the novel charts the shifting terrain of intimacy: the laughter of late-night conversations, the suffocating silence of hospital corridors, the brittle comedy of social facades. It is a book about marriage and infidelity, but also about what it means to be alive in the shadow of death.
Friday at Four is a rare achievement — a novel that confronts love, death, and the limits of forgiveness with unsparing honesty.
When David’s marriage to Alice falters, the presence of Julia, younger and full of life, only sharpens the cracks. But as Alice is struck by a terminal illness, the fragile balance between love, anger, loyalty, and guilt collapses.
Friday at Four is a stark and moving story about marriage, infidelity, and the courage to face death. With unadorned honesty and rare emotional depth, this moving novel explores the ties that bind us — and how easily they unravel.
With precise, almost clinical observation and passages of lyrical beauty, the novel charts the shifting terrain of intimacy: the laughter of late-night conversations, the suffocating silence of hospital corridors, the brittle comedy of social facades. It is a book about marriage and infidelity, but also about what it means to be alive in the shadow of death.
Friday at Four is a rare achievement — a novel that confronts love, death, and the limits of forgiveness with unsparing honesty.
After all these years, I finally managed to learn dog language. That is to say, I cannot yet understand all dogs, and they probably do not understand me either. But I can speak with my dog, and Lea speaks with me.
That is more than a beginning. It is almost a breakthrough. One could even call it a discovery, because until now, no one else has truly understood a dog — except me.
Lea is a brown setter with dark eyes. I mention her eyes because they matter: Lea speaks with her eyes.
Even when she was very young, when I thought her head was full of nothing but nonsense, it became clear to me that Lea wanted to tell me something. She seemed to have things to say that went far beyond the obvious signals of hunger or the need to go outside. Well — perhaps it was not all that clear. My wife, for instance, has never noticed. But then, it may simply be that Lea has nothing to say to her. Only to me. That is entirely possible.
Strictly speaking, it is not that I learned the language of dogs. Rather, Lea showed me a way to communicate with her. It has little to do with my academic field, though I do study the behaviour of living beings. Yes, I know that is a sweeping phrase, but how else to describe the territory between schools of fish, flocks of migratory birds, and summer tourists — the urge to set off, the sudden changes of direction in a swarm, the friction between them (if there is any), the formation and dissolution, the shifting destinations?
We have written computer programs that simulate swarm behaviour, which is, of course, basically nonsense. All we really learn is how to create a program that does something, and then we spend years trying to understand what it is doing. Silly, yes, but well paid — and these days, who can say their job is secure? Besides, I enjoy it, most of the time. A small boy running his toy train around in circles knows what he is doing is pointless, yet he enjoys it. The difference is, he does not call it science, and he certainly does not receive government funding for it.
Perhaps we should not take it all so seriously. Perhaps the real game lies in persuading the tiers of civil servants — low, middle, and high — that a project is so urgent, or so promising, that it deserves to be funded. Maybe I should ask Lea about that.
It may surprise you, but Lea often knows more than I do. If you thought her linguistic talents extended only to differentiating between brands of canned food, you can put this book away right now. It would be absurd to write about that.
We do not communicate through tapping noises — as when people point to a dog wagging its tail on the carpet and say, Look, he’s happy, he’s about to get a cookie. Nor do we use sounds. “Woof, Lea?” That would be ridiculous.
It is the eyes, as I have already said. Mine too, probably, but I cannot judge; you would have to ask Lea. And now comes the difficult part, so bear with me. It is like when two lovers look into each other’s eyes. Forgive me the comparison, but I am sure you have known the experience at least once in your life: you look into someone’s eyes, and for a moment you are one with them. A recognition beyond words, a comprehension, a clarity. Yes — you know what I mean.
And perhaps you miss it. Words, even touches, are only pale attempts to recapture it. The harder you try, the less you succeed. And so we search, and search again. Sometimes we stop searching and take the nearest substitute.
* * * * *
Of course, it is not easy to look a dog in the eyes. Try it, and either the dog will look away and run off, or it will attack with sudden aggression. Best not to try, in fact, because in my experience you cannot predict what will happen.
You cannot give a dog sidelong glances, the kind we use to express amused approval. You can watch him stare at a slice of sausage, for example, held temptingly just out of reach. Some call this a harmless game, affectionate teasing; to me it feels like a mild form of cruelty. But in any case, direct eye contact is nearly impossible. No dog will let you look into its eyes.
Except Lea. One day — she had already been with us for quite some time — I felt her gaze on me. I turned, looked into her eyes, and she let me. No, more than that: she was the one who looked.
I was in a strange mood that day. I had dreamt one of those dreams that feels less like a dream than another life. You know it cannot be true, but the impression lingers. I had been carrying a marathon runner on my shoulders like a child, up a mountain that I recognised though it does not exist. At the summit I set her down, thinking I was still in decent shape. I embraced her; she felt solid. “What colour am I to you?” I asked. She considered, then said, “Dark red.” And I realised she was right: I felt dark red. “And me?” she asked. “What colour am I to you?” I answered at once: “Blue.” A soft, dove blue — dark, muted, not the bright Mediterranean shade.
When I woke, I wished I could meet her again. At that moment, I felt Lea’s eyes on me. I turned, and we looked at each other, and neither of us looked away. The gate opened, and we both stepped through.
Until then, I had never thought much about the inner world of a dog. Of course, I knew — our research made it obvious — that dogs are highly developed animals with their own, if limited, intelligence. Yet Lea was, to me, merely our pet: cuddly, playful, always hungry, a teddy bear with a very narrow repertoire — eating, walking, chasing sticks, barking at the postman, sleeping. Sleeping most of all. Her simplicity was part of her charm.
I would never have thought to converse with her. I considered dogs, in truth, to be slightly backward creatures, and myself too clever to bother. Be kind, yes. Stimulus and response, yes. But why open a black box that had nothing inside?
And then our eyes met. The cave collapsed, and I had no choice. Her gaze did not invite or demand; it simply was. And suddenly everything was clear.
My wife came in. “Aren’t you going to work?” she asked. Then: “Why are you crying?” Almost tenderly. How could I explain that they were tears of joy, of relief, because I had arrived? How does a spring explain why it bubbles?
From that day on, everything was different. Outwardly, nothing changed: I got up, ate breakfast, took Lea to the park, threw her a stick, read the paper, went to the institute. At work, I did what I always did. No one noticed any difference. And yet everything was different.
* * * * *
At the institute, I set up the video cameras for tank 14, where we kept the gratlings. We filmed them continuously, from three angles, to capture a spatial perspective. The idea was to determine whether swarms formed spontaneously, and under what conditions — whether there were external triggers, or something internal.
Three of my doctoral students were busy marking individual fish in the video recordings. In the past, of course, one would have marked the actual fish, with paint or with radioactive particles. Even now, birds are still ringed, jaguars fitted with collars. We rejected such methods. They are already an intervention.
We worked virtually. Each fish received an identification number — C204, for instance — though, inevitably, some were given real names. Amanda, for example, seemed to act as a leader: a group of smaller gratlings always followed her.
Naturally, this was problematic. Naming the fish humanised them. “Avoid anthropomorphising,” Professor Labahn used to remind us. Easy to say. Even if Amanda appeared only as a yellow dot on the monitor, she was still followed by a cluster of smaller dots. And we could not help but think: there goes Amanda. She’s the leader.
But when I look at those dots now, I smile. Because I know it is not true. There is no Amanda, neither as dot nor as fish. Certainly not as a leader. Lea told me that. It took me a long time to understand.
The miracle was that what happened between us was not a single, extraordinary event. Lea managed it again. And again. And again. I cannot even say I “managed” anything. It simply happened — not once, but many times. Eventually, it could happen without her being present at all. We no longer needed eye contact. The understanding was already there.
And yet, to call it “talking” is misleading. There were no words, no sentences, not even clear thoughts. At best, one might say there was an exchange of knowing. But even that is inaccurate. It was not an exchange. Lea had so much to give, and I so little. She opened treasure chest after treasure chest; I gave her back my arrogance, my pettiness, my melancholy, my awkward pride. The imbalance was vast, but Lea accepted it. She needed almost nothing.
Climbing down from one’s pedestal is not easy. It takes time — months, years, perhaps a lifetime. At first, I was so certain of myself. I knew that when I knew something, it was true. Facts were facts. The only challenge lay in understanding them.
Lea taught me uncertainty.
One day, when I called her by name — “Lea” — she asked me who I meant. The question unsettled me.
“You, of course,” I said. “You, Lea.”
“I don’t exist,” she said.
“But I can see you,” I protested.
“You see me because you are accustomed to seeing me that way. But it could all be different.”
“Yes, yes,” I said, relieved to be back on familiar ground, verbal sparring. “Of course it could. For example?”
But Lea would not play along.
“You see yourself, and you see me,” she said quietly. “But I see something else: neither you nor me.”
“What, then?” I asked.
“I see a relationship.”
I confess I did not understand. So I suggested we go for a walk, and Lea, obliging as ever, wagged her tail and agreed.
When we are not having these conversations — and I must stress again, they do not take the form of dialogue, though I write them here as such — we look like any ordinary owner and dog. Lea has a will of her own. She ignores me when I call her, bolts when she is off the lead, pays no attention to traffic, terrifies small children. Though in fairness, she is gentle with children. Still, she has teeth, a wet nose, a formidable bark. If I were a child, and Lea barked in my face from ten inches away, I would scream too.
Lea is beautiful — like many setters, graceful in movement, her coat silky and inviting. People are drawn to stroke her. She tolerates it, mostly, but not always, and not from everyone. What she will not tolerate is having her ears pulled — a favourite trick of children. First they stroke, then they tug. That is when mothers scold me to put my dog on a leash.
* * * * *
As we walked along the riverbank one day, I thought again about what she had said. Relationships. What could she mean? There is Lea. There is me. And between us, a relationship. So what?
No, Lea said in my mind. There is not Lea. There is not you. There is nothing there but a relationship. No Lea. No you. Only the relationship.
Lea was racing a greyhound. She lost, as always. But perhaps winning was never the point.
It is bewildering, I thought. If I told anyone my dog spoke to me, they would lock me up. And if I told them what she said, she would have to be locked up with me.
* * * * *
The next morning at the institute, we had our regular doctoral seminar. My boss joined us, bringing an intern — though she already had a doctorate — interested in the postdoc programme. “She’d like to look around,” he said. “Perhaps she’d be a good fit for your team.”
I wasn’t thrilled. But she was quiet, and unlikely to cause trouble.
Jonathan gave his update on tank 14, the virtual marking of the gratlings. When he finished, I said I had an idea and asked the new arrival — Sabine — whether she would think it through. My suggestion was simple:
Until now, we had treated each gratling as an individual, with its coded name. We had treated the swarm as a meta-individual, the sum of its members. I proposed we stop regarding the gratlings as individuals at all, and focus instead only on the relationships between them — the lines that had so far been invisible.
“Yes, but,” Jonathan objected, “that is what we already do. We look at the relationships between Amanda and her group, for instance. Isn’t that the point?”
“Who is Amanda?” Sabine asked.
“Never mind,” I said. “I mean only the relationships. Without the individuals.”
Jonathan sneered. “Gratling people.”
But I had already learned something from Lea. I did not let myself be derailed.
“Imagine a Gothic cathedral,” I said. “Chartres, say. What we see are the stones, the arches, the roof. But what if we could map the lines of force, the pressures and tensions?”
“Structural engineers do this,” Sabine said. “They build Plexiglas models. Apply pressure, and coloured stress lines appear, like oil on water. You can see where the forces converge, where they pull apart. Is that what you mean?”
“Exactly,” I said. “The masons who built those cathedrals must have had such a plan in their minds. The arches came after. The lines were first. That is what I want to see.”
“And what do our gratlings have to do with that?” Jonathan muttered.
“I’ll take care of it,” said Sabine. “I’ll think about it.”
* * * * *
I told Lea about this development. Curiously, she had little to say. But I found myself increasingly drawn to the idea of relationships. Again and again, I caught myself still thinking of two people as beginning and end, the nodes between which a line is drawn. But slowly — with Lea’s silent help — I began to see that it was the relationship itself that mattered, not the people.
At the institute I pressed the point more and more. Sabine warmed to it. The others remained sceptical. Jonathan smirked when he saw me with Sabine at the blackboard. “How’s your relationship going?” he asked.
“Like lightning,” I told her. “There is no cloud, no tree. Only the discharge, looking for its poles.”
“I’ll have to think about that,” Sabine said. She was slow but thorough, and she would not be intimidated. Not by Jonathan, not by me. She would not accept what she did not understand, but she would not reject it either.
Our gratling swarm as a cluster of relationships — the thought seemed more promising by the day. The dots on our monitor no longer looked random to me. They shifted with phases of attraction and repulsion, like tides. It was no different with us humans: sometimes we draw near, sometimes we withdraw. Who likes whom, I thought, is more a matter of presence and circumstance than destiny. Why do most marriages form at work, and not in heaven? Perhaps relationships hover, waiting to alight on suitable poles.
But that is not very romantic. Where is the great love in that?
Lea only smiled, furrowed her brow, and left me to work it out for myself.
* * * * *
I didn’t know what to do. The heat had settled in for days, and I longed for a holiday. But one cannot abandon a research project for three weeks. The gratlings had to be fed and observed around the clock. Everything was organised, of course, schedules drawn up — who did what, and when. But the plan did not care for my longing. I was firmly bound to it.
“I don’t know what to do, Lea,” I said one afternoon. We had walked along the river for a long while, and now I sat in the shade on a park bench. Lea lay before me, watching.
“Help me,” I whispered. I looked into her eyes and let go. And she let me in.
Her silence enfolded me like a kind of weightless embrace. I drifted. I became lighter, less substantial. Everything was right.
“My thoughts keep circling,” I said. “I can’t stop thinking about relationships. I get caught in them. I see them everywhere. I invent examples.”
Lea looked at me.
“Networks of relationships,” I said, “woven like nets, and we are their knots. We are their functions, their products. That is why we change. I am not who I was thirty years ago. Not simply older. Different. Because the relationships threading through me have changed.”
Lea looked at me.
“I wonder whether these networks have an intelligence of their own. The network needs a connection, and suddenly it seizes me. Did I ever decide to look for my wife? No. We met. We fell in love. But what did we have to do with it? It simply happened.”
Lea looked at me.
“Is that what you meant when you said neither you nor I exist?”
I was getting carried away, desperate for her to give me back the security I once had. But she would not. She had pulled the ground from under my feet, and instead of helping me back to shore, she wanted me to learn to swim. Without a shore. Without support.
“Help me,” I pleaded.
“Look inside yourself,” she said.
How well I knew it all — the self-doubt, the futility, the mask of optimism. How many of my colleagues would have been content with even a shred of theory, something to illuminate the dark, however faintly. I too. But since Lea had taken me under her wing — if I can say that without irony — I found myself doubting the whole enterprise. Replacing one theory with another. What was the point?
Still, the work went on. Jonathan marked his gratlings and I pretended interest. Sabine devised a typology of relationships, like the early psychologists with their endless catalogues of drives — one of them being “the urge to poke a finger into small cracks.” Why not?
And I sat in my office, surrounded by heavy, important-looking books, struggling not to think about what I had already begun to call “relationship theory.” A ridiculous term. And yet it gripped me.
Until one day I gave in. I told myself: it is not my doing. Somewhere, a relationship has seized me and is using me as its instrument. Close your eyes. Let it. It is no more under your control than falling in love. Stop resisting. Just follow.
And immediately I felt relieved. Whether it was pointless or not was no longer my concern. The decision was made elsewhere.
That evening, I told Lea. She listened, patient as always. “You’re right, of course,” she said. “But only if your theory is correct.”
I scratched behind her ears and smiled. What do dogs know?
* * * * *
Summer came in its familiar lightness — cool mornings, long evenings. Lea swam in the river, I threw sticks. Once I threw too far and she swam straight into the path of a rowing regatta and disrupted the race. I pretended not to know her.
The gratlings multiplied so fast that we faced a choice: enlarge the tank, split the population, or kill some off. Building another tank would not stop the exponential growth. In the end, we connected a second tank to number 14 with a Plexiglas tube and waited. Some fish crossed. When the population in 14 returned to normal, we sealed the passage. Then, after some debate, we euthanised the second population. Four thousand gratlings cannot simply be tipped into the sewer.
Jonathan was relieved to see his marked favourites — Amanda and her entourage — had stayed put. Otherwise, his work would have been wasted. Sabine, however, seemed unfazed. Her relationship patterns were stable, independent of numbers. She was quietly pleased.
“Shouldn’t we publish something soon?” I asked her one day. She came in with a coffee. I waved her to a chair. “Relationship theory is promising. Before someone else lays claim to it ... ”
It was far too early, of course. We had only fragments. Perhaps we would only inspire others to steal the idea.
“Still,” I said, “why don’t you prepare something?” She nodded.
By the end of term, she had written a short paper — more a sketch than anything else. She began: the starting point is relationships. We do not know where they come from or how they arise. They are not things but potentials, like electrical charges, varying in strength and direction. They form dynamic patterns in time and space, multi-dimensional networks. At their nodes, special potentials can gather — for example, matter.
“Yes,” I said, pointing to the sheet. “That is how I imagine it too. But it’s dangerous. We can’t prove any of it. It has little to do with gratlings now. Our colleagues could easily dismiss it as speculation.”
“Of course,” Sabine said dryly. “I think we’re hallucinating. When people run out of explanations, they invoke invisible forces — preferably in a fifth dimension. This ‘space of relations’ is no different.”
“And now?” I asked.
“As for me,” she said casually, “I’ve taken a job in Florida. Dolphin research. Something solid. Better weather. I start in October.”
I swallowed hard. I would have expected anything but that.
“And this?” I tapped her paper.
“Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone. I don’t want to make a fool of myself.”
* * * * *
Betrayal. That was the word that came to me.
“Why are you staring at Lea?” my wife asked. “Nothing on TV?”
I walked by the river. A boy, about twelve, floated in a grey tyre. “Dad! Dad! I can still stand here!” His father, only his head above the water, did not even look.
“Dad! Dad! I can still stand here!”
Why do children so often have such whiny voices?
“Dad! Dad! There’s still ground here!”
Relationships, I thought. Relationships. Just leave me alone.
* * * * *
Was this the famous “moment of truth”? When either bullfighter or bull wins, or when the matador simply runs away?
I felt like running. Then again, I felt a surge of defiance: I’ll show you all. I drew diagrams, crumpled papers, trawled the internet, met a sociologist for coffee, spoke with computer scientists on neural networks. The result: I was alone.
Worst of all was the fear of madness. I had lost my bearings. I began to observe myself. That was no help: the same act could be judged sane or insane depending on context. Was climbing a mountain to preach love to strangers madness? Not normal, certainly. But insane?
I listened to music. Before, it soothed me. Now it terrified me. I could hear it from the inside, as if I were within a moving architecture of sound. Voices and rhythms formed structural lines around me, threatening collapse. Music had always been flat, external, like a film score. Now I was inside it, and it frightened me.
Whom could I ask? The family doctor on his scooter? A psychiatrist, who would stroke his beard and prescribe neuroleptics, if he didn’t lock me up first? A pastor? Hardly. It hadn’t been long since they were called shepherds of souls, and people trusted them. Not me.
Lea watched me with her brown eyes. “Am I crazy?” I asked her. “Am I?”
I held her gaze. My walls slowly crumbled. The space opened. It began to flow.
“What does it matter?” said Lea. “Crazy, sane — words, nothing more. Words mean nothing. They are ladders fixed to cliffs, useful for climbers, but birds need no ladders. Words make cliffs into obstacles. Without words, there is no danger.”
Her words comforted me, though I did not understand them.
Still, I felt steadier. Steady enough to try a psychologist.
* * * * *
The psychologist was a young woman, with long black hair, curls like a Mona Lisa. Cheerful, open. Somehow familiar.
“You look familiar,” I said.
“That could be. Until six months ago, I was a taxi driver.” She laughed. “So. What brings you here?”
I hesitated, then told her. My discovery. My doubt whether it was discovery or nonsense. My fear of losing my mind.
“Do you drink? Take drugs? Medication?”
“No.” The question surprised me.
“I thought not. That rules out the obvious. Do you hear voices? See visions?”
“No.” Talking to Lea didn’t count. That was something else entirely.
“What do you do?”
“I’m a professor.”
“Would I understand your discovery if you told me?”
“I think so.”
“Good. Imagine Einstein here. I ask if I could understand his work. He shakes his head sadly. In his time, only a handful of physicists could.”
“You’re right,” I said.
“Exactly. So I won’t fall into the trap of judging whether your discovery is genius or nonsense. Though if you want, I’ll listen for hours and charge accordingly.” She smiled. “Coffee?”
“Yes, please.”
She pressed buttons on a complicated machine. While it hissed and sputtered, she said: “What would have to happen for you to say with certainty: now I’m crazy?”
I considered. “Perhaps if I lost all control. If I killed someone. Jumped from a window.”
“And how close are you to that?”
“Light years,” I said, and laughed. I felt better already. The coffee helped too.
“So what’s the real problem?”
“That I think others will think I’m crazy if I tell them.”
“Have you tried?”
I told her about Sabine. How she had seemed fascinated. How she had left me in a heartbeat, making it clear she found me ridiculous.
“That’s bitter,” said the psychologist. “That hurts. Since then, you’ve wondered if she was right.”
I nodded.
“Fine. Now, we can hold hands if you like, though you don’t seem the type. Instead, let’s boil this down.”
I nodded.
“First: the relationship story. Someone you trusted left you, and you feel exposed. Fair?”
Yes. Exactly. And said so.
“Second: your work is uncharted. Total risk. You walk alone at night through a forest, no path, no map. Maybe you’ll stumble back to your own door. Maybe America was discovered long ago. Maybe you waste your life. Or maybe you win a Nobel Prize. Anything is possible. Your whole social existence is at stake. And you’re surprised you’re afraid?”
She glanced at her watch and grinned. "We psychologists have a trick. Whenever things get really exciting, we say that time is up. Unfortunately, that's always the case. See you in a week, okay?"
* * * * *
Gert Richter classifies his brilliant novel, Friday at Four, as women’s fiction. I would place it somewhere between literary fiction and psychological fiction (but definitely not a thriller!). I dispute the classification as women’s fiction because the protagonist is a man, and I certainly wouldn’t limit the readership to women. This is a work that will appeal to anyone, regardless of gender, who appreciates deep introspection. The synopsis leads us to believe it’s about David’s marriage to Alice faltering and David’s affair with Julia, and it is, but the early chapters kind of mislead the reader to see it as something else entirely. Reading about a man talking to his dog may be a little off-putting, and I confess to considering putting the work down after the first couple of chapters, but I am pleased that I didn’t. Richter goes on to deliver precisely what was promised: “a stark and moving story about marriage, infidelity, and the courage to face death” and “a moving novel that explores the ties that bind us - and how easily they unravel”.
The story follows David, a professor locked in a dull and dissatisfying life, but studying the way relationships develop by observing the way fish swarm. His work seems somewhat trivial and absurd, until you realize that Richter is actually examining interconnections in human relationships.. Richter goes on to describe David’s relationship with his wife, Alice, and the development of a friendship with Julia, a psychologist. While David is the protagonist, Richter describes, in depth, the transformation of Alice as she faces the knowledge of her husband’s infidelity, and ultimately her strength as she journeys from fear and frustration to confidence and courage to face death. Her strength and clarity, as she grows, contrast sharply with David’s confusion and self-doubt.
Literary fiction often contains passages of sophisticated prose. Despite Gert Richter’s claim that Friday at Four contains “passages of lyrical beauty”, it seemed to me to lack “sophisticated prose”, but it meets all the other requirements of literary fiction. It is characterised by deep introspection and emphasis on the human condition. It is more concerned with internal conflict and character reaction than with an entertaining story. And yet it is certainly entertaining. It is a work that stays with you long after you finish reading, and one you may well want to come back to later. It isn’t just a story about marriage, friendship, and temptation. It’s deeply philosophical. It’s about identity, connection, and the human conscience. It’s a deep and thought-provoking examination of relationships and how relationships create and develop character and personality. Lovers of psychological fiction will delight in the way Richter captures the complexities of human emotion and the impact of the inevitable sequence of life changes. While mildly disappointed by the first couple of chapters of this work, I quickly moved on to delight in the way Richter captures the complexities of human emotion. Gert Richter’s Friday at Flour is undoubtedly a five-star novel, and one I highly recommend to anyone who appreciates great works of literary or psychological fiction.