In French means "prancing"; in English, "caper." Both words perfectly describe this high-spirited erotic adventure. In , White invents an entire world where country gentry languish in decaying mansions and foppish intellectuals exchange lovers and gossip in an occupied city that resembles both Paris under the Nazis and 1980s New York. To that city comes Gabriel, an awkward boy from the provinces whose social naïveté and sexual ardor make him endlessly attractive to a variety of patrons and paramours. "A seduction through language, a masque without masks, brings back to startling life a dormant strain in serious American writing: the idea of the romantic."—Cynthia Ozick