At the center of Moise and the World of Reason is the need of three people for each other: Moise, an impoverished and quixotic young painter with a gift for unfinished canvases; the narrator, a young man from Thelma, Alabama, who is determined to be a distinguished writer; and Lance, the man whose intensity, strength, and sensuality held them all together while he lived, and whose absence gives the nocel its strange and haunting power and pathos.

Then, there’s the need for love, which then propels them through a long and restless night in Greenwich Village – a night in which Moise gives a party to announce her retirement from “the world of reason”; in which the narrator loses his roomate, the “second love of his life”; and in which a lifetime of experience, hope, the loss of innocence, and the rekindling of desire is exposed in a series of scenes and encounters so dramatic, moving, and precise.