In The Valmont, a posh condo development in New Orleans, once an Ursuline convent, seven residents-a real estate developer, a Russian ballerina, a legal secretary, a TV personality, a US Attorney, a French professor, and a Jesuit priest embody the classical vices. Their intertwined lives pass through bedroom and theatre, carnival and courtroom, exorcism and suicide, as the narrator studies the infirmities of modern life with an eye to a cure. Meanwhile, the inexistent voice of angel or spirit or daimon haunts the Valmont, finding the moral diagnosis itself curiously symptomatic of the current state of the human soul. Maladies is a philosophical novel for readers with lively minds, keen on hope in dark times.