"Don't you see," one of Martin Brent's wives once said to him, "there's a difference between doing things you have to do—and making the responsibility for doing those things the whole of your life?"

Brent is a newspaperman; and it is a particular strength of his story that there is something of him-a small-town boy who made good -in many "successful" men today. Not all of them, however, carry a sense of responsibility so far. And during one empty day, when he looks at his life and wrestles for the first time with the consuming mystery of his own existence, he remembers what his wife had said.

Richard Lockridge develops his characters quietly, surely, definitively—the thoroughly appealing Marty Brent as boy and man; his well-meaning but rather futile parents; his two sisters, alike only in the degree of their selfishness; and his oddly dissimilar wives. So powerfully does the author convey the emotional content of every situation and scene that one can feel the acrid misery of a family disgrace in a small Midwestern city ... the shamefaced delight of first love... the routine of work in a stagnating newspaper office ... the magnificent physical companionship of Martin and his first wife, which, good as it was, could not save their marriage.

Through Marty's terrible effort to see where he has lost himself—if, indeed, he has ever been himself—The Empty Day opens to the reader a man's whole heart and life. Everyone who shares his search for answers to the questions Who am I? and What have I done with my years? will be greatly rewarded.