The loss of accent and of wit signals a broader, more inclusive poverty. Figures in the stories are repeatedly saying that they cannot help being the way they are and their actions bear them out. They are, for the most part, creatures without will and therefore with very little of what normally passes for character. They do not choose one action instead of another any more than they choose one word rather than another. They are collections of compulsions, driven to behave in crude, destructive fashion while mouthing futile cliche after futile cliche.
People behave as if in a state of permanent trance.
In ''Queen of the Night'' a middle-aged woman whose husband divorces her after many years marries an emaciated young vagrant who sits around the house all day hitting one or two chords on the piano and getting stoned. In ''The Precipice,'' a college professor cannot keep from getting into fist fights despite the fact that he always loses. In ''A MiddleClass Education,'' a witness to a murder cannot keep his mind off the crime. In ''The Tryst,'' a married man cannot stay away from his young mistress until she takes a razor to herself in his bathroom. In a particularly haunting story, ''In the Autumn of the Year,'' a seemingly benign music teacher lashes out viciously at an elderly poet who had once been his father's mistress.